Lizzy Pauwels • lizzy.pauwels@gmail.com • instagram

'...Working with stones, looking for the story of the stone, a boulder belongs to the boulders like a person belongs to the people. They experience the same things, Lizzy thinks. Pebbles sit still, do not contradict, let your imagination take flight through their shape and color. They conform to any situation by simply and completely remaining themselves. In any case, they carry old age with them and thus convey steadfastness. So they very easily become a metaphor...'

(Perseverance in frailty', P. Boël, 2024)

'...Her paintings exudes the same sense of distance, or perhaps better, the hesitation to name. Why does her image falter and fall apart, is it affected, vulnerable and unfinished? Perhaps the truth lies precisely in the stubborn drops on the canvas, in the light that breaks through the streaks of paint, through cracks as if they were scars. In the messy images of fragments of indeterminate memory, in which the colors may only be color, hesitantly. The scraped texture of the painting feels like the peeling of skin on which drops echo on the canvas after the passage of the paint brush. Everything exudes hesitation or is it really a conscious letting go of too strict control over the image?

And what does she want to let go of, why does she seek out that uncertainty, the unexpected?'

(Perseverance in frailty', P. Boël, 2024)

'...The hermetic nature of the stone is particularly fascinating. Each stone is in itself nothing other than itself. That provides something to hold on to that you can cherish and propagate. That's why you would think that the solidity of the stone would be recognizable in paintings and images that Lizzy makes of it. But nothing is less true.Her work radiates delicacy and vulnerability, the pebbles are multi-colored and have porous skin, just like her other works. Life and vulnerability shine through. She seems to want to contrast the unwavering character of what a rock stands for with security and empathy.'

(Perseverance in frailty', P. Boël, 2024)

'...Time and again Lizzy introduces randomness and coincidence into her oeuvre. That is, without a doubt, the leitmotiv in the choices she makes, as an artist, and especially as a human being. She likes experimenting and the consequences that come with it, even if they are failures, because in her world and thinking, they are a crucial part of a learning process. (her commitment to art education is not just there, it fills an existential need).

Driven by a special rational curiosity in almost everything she does, she questions the world and silently writes down all the answers in a huge imaginary notebook to which only she has access. Without revealing too much (perhaps she is the stone). She likes to leave that to others. Her affection therefore rests with people who dare to name things, as if she wants to embrace what touches her, even what hurts her. In the way she deals with people and things, her attention and love permeates gently, patiently and even vulnerably. The stone comes in countless shapes and colors.'

(Perseverance in frailty', P. Boël, 2024)

Envoi

Rock, bear these impressions kindly.

They are pictographs of an earlier day than now,

Telling of a time when a new world was forming

Out of the same old elements.

( Robinson Jeffers, 1924, from 'Tamar and Other Poems')

'...So it seems less important to her to name the people and things themselves, but rather how they want and can describe themselves. That is why her works present themselves as indeterminate shadow images of a reality that takes place outside, as residual images or fragments of stories collected together to form a congruence of meanings. In this way she conducts an archeology of Being and inherent to the nature of archeology her description remains imperfect. Her quest epitomizes embracing deficiency.'

(Perseverance in frailty', P. Boël, 2024)

'...

Who ultimately recognizes the kinship

between the pebbles on the beach in Dungeness,

that lie nameless next to each other,

untouchable as condensed souls in a landscape

with an ever-changing view

and her own (studio) room,  the salon

the place where she silently gathers the world,

where Mildred receives her artists with great hospitality

Alice renames the theater with fragments and puzzle pieces

and Lizzy bounces her pebbles

to make them disappear into the sea

in the light on the horizon.'

(Perseverance in frailty', P. Boël, 2024)