The belgian in Milan-based artist Josine Dupont thoroughly surprised me with her current set of works. It is my honor to have curated her show “Metaphysics of form”, which is installed in a very impressive space in the heart of Milan. The exhibition represent a variety of works spanning from pessimistic portraits with envied communication skills, to more complex depictions, always tackeling the dissolution of form in connection with the uman body. In focus is the “dissolution”, rather than “methaphysics” as she calls it, than despite being the right concept from the philosophical poin of view; it is rather unambiguous when you consider the metaphysical paintings of De Chirico and Carrà.
A more precise definition for her works lies in “the abstract propensity of the figurative”.
Figuration displays and veils the real traits of the subject, thought it always remains visible in some sort of form, wether it is suggested or obvious. The form itself only desplays its essence, which indicates a possible whole. During the years of her artistic maturity, Dupont rigorously researched on the essence of figurative form, which encouraged her to depicton its mere appearance. The artist uses different techniques retrachting different forms of the human body.
By adding colour to the forms, she finds ways to make her figures alive. Through applying monochrome colours or just two sets of colours, the figures adapt different forms of movement.
By adding brighter and livelier colours she establishes a balance, between abstraction and figuration, which becomes her most successful acronym.
Visible in her work are antecedent such as Scialoja, but she reflects an obvious stubbomness to show what paining seems to haide through rarefaction. Another artist that appears to be in relation with her work is De Pisis, who recolled sensitivity and taste in extraordinary abstract forms by depicting gestures. Dupont reflects traits of this, what De Pisis communicated, in a more extreme synthesis.
By looking at her works one immediately identifies the uneasieness of recognition, through by longer reading one slowly drifts into the depths of the painting and so begins to rediscover the youth, the female figure, the unmade bed.
Persistant in her work is the desire to see what lies beyond appearances. Hence,the name of the exhibition “Methafysics of form” expresses the idea of trying on a pholosophical noumenon, rather than a phenomenon, which is more of a concept than the represented reality.
Her works was a research project with an almost mystical dimension, just like a uprise to an absolute form, and threfore a form of mystical rise.

There is something in Josine Dupont’s painting that reminds of Fautrier’s “Captives”.
However years do not pass in vane: history evolves. In these paintings by Josine Dupont there is a more or less conscious reference to the great french Master, but there is also a precise overcoming. The reference is to the human condition of being an existential “captive”, that has characterized European social and cultural life for two centuries now.
Moreover, the discovery of the sense and meaning of matter, specifically definited as “material used as a means of expression” (Dorfles), shows them as a positive consequence of informal, which is one of those connotations that developed from Fautrier’s experience eventually characterising a whole artistic mentality: “tachisme”, “art autre”, “action painting”, contextual forms that never dismissed their affinity with informal.
This all lies inside Josine Dupont’s painting, but there is, and there could not be absent, something substantially different, constituting a great step forward with respect to those problems, which is the rediscovery of matter under another shape.
It is always the same problem: how to get back to the real world without trodding the beaten: and now impracticable-tracks. Than matter will acquire its full philosophical, aristotelic meaning.
In this perspective the compositional structure acquires a definitely meaningful character: crooked fragments of planes intersecting, variously articulated and modular planes, shreds of surfaces flying in the air, straight and curved lines, stains, indistinct shapes.
And the precariousness of shapes gives sense to the precariousness of life, elevated to supporting structure of the same. And matter is no longer what the work is made of, as for Fautrier, but what the work rapresents.
For Twentieth-century informal matter and reality did not exist. In reality there was more emptiness than fullness. The spect of things was deceiving. Today Josine Dupont recovers things and under their shapeless (no longer informal) aspect suggest their substantial shape, figures that can be inferred, precarious lives. The claiming of life in reality happens in its most human shapes, those of daily life, as well as the overcoming of real in shapes that still preserve an
indelible track defines the absolute independence of creativity. So it is the different moments that do not follow a chronological order, but rather overlap like stratigraphies of an analysis of reality, a kind of probing of the knoledge of the world trough the shapes of art, that the extraordinary pictorial skills of Josine Dupont’s matched to a strong personal sensitivity produce new roads, and there is no returning to figures, rather using theme.