Juliet Vles' recent paintings, abstractions that border on the figurative, borrow meaning and essence from the forms of nature – what the artist calls «organic abstraction». In this context, the works in the Witwater series occupy an important place. Fascinated by hydraulic studies, technical sketches a priori without artistic ambition, Vles takes up their structure and the treatment of water «slowed down» into a solid substance, whose frozen movement ressembles braided hair or the drapery of a transparent fabric.
From this formal appropriation, Vles follows its different material and spiritual visions of water. Its power in the «Waves», braids of water climbing in a compact spiral to the upper margin of the painting, to open in a singular wave and fall back with force the length of the canvas. Its geometry in «Concentric Circles», its fluidity in «Streamlines», linear curtains of water covering the canvas and its initial design, evoking the mirage of a hidden landscape. Its grace in «Wings», aquatic and aerial at once. Its archaic turbulence in the «Nativity» cycle, whose rhythm and baroque design mark the element's archetypal character.
Water, even in its abstraction, remains an indigenous energy, a primary force that excludes human presence.The anthropocentric ideal is definitively rejected. Any psychological or sociological interpretation, reducing nature to a function of the human mind, would be out of place in the face of such an elementary work. A work as transparent as water; no mystery other than that of simple natural form, no objective other than that of simple artistic documentation. No pretension other than that of painting, no research other than that of the image. Plastic art in its most modest, and most difficult, form.
G. Leon Taveling, 2004 (translated with DeepL)
