Dominique GobletOstende

“Ostend, the first part of the Derrière series, is at first glance a series of paintings, a melancholic walk through the serene landscapes of Flanders. But underneath their pictorial beauty, out of time, these landscapes are ready to burst, inhabited by hypotheses as to what is hidden by appearances and habit, inhabited by desires, fantasies, forms – flesh or abstractions – of which one does not know if they are real or imaginary. A geometrical grammar disturbs the space, noises break a comfortable silence and make it speak, like accidents in the decor of a well-trodden show, tears in a well known canvas, through which sensations, tensions, desires rush in…

With eyes that are both voyeuristic and benevolent, Ostend tears up the surface that our eyes are limited to seeing, seizes what happens outside the field, where desires and vital impulses roar in silence, where sensations and abstractions dance. Behind the dike, in an isolated farm, on a beach at night, his landscapes form a scene where everything can happen, calm before the storm of sensations. A counter-field teeming with hidden adventures settles in little by little, revealed by suggestive prose, minutes of erotic or liberating scenes.

Dominique Goblet blows hot and cold, makes us wander, search. She makes us slide from softness to brutality, from the zany to the sublime, on a thread between a too calm reality and a luxuriant imagination. Our thirst for freedom and our fear of the unknown are constantly confronting each other, and little by little are reconciled in the desire.”