"France Houle"

Houle's paintings, though heavily relying on abstraction, do not always renounce reality outright. One can discern characteristics of the real world creeping into the abstract, though in the slightest degrees. Swaths of color are applied in a way that suggest a third dimension or there seems to be coherent scene, but it happens to be obscured, as if viewed through thick glass embedded with impurities or the abstract is presented as an object, suggesting that there is a gravity-optional world in which such objects exist.

The paintings convey incompletion, estimation and a lack of resolution. The application of color takes multiple attempts. Houle's avoidance of discrete objects and rejection of tidy brushstrokes results in beauty conflated with at least some melancholy. Her objects are distant relatives of the flame. Often, the abstract seems to yearn for real existence. Sometimes the paintings are primarily the expression of a concept, such as "decay."

-Eugene Hwang