Noëll

A force of one in the french abstract unitarity movement

The unitarité abstraite movement was formed as a result of the vision of Noëll, an uprooted artist. Having been torn from her native Algeria, since 1978 Noëll’s work has taken a partial hiatous from informal painting. The unitarité, despite using the concepts found in lyrical abstraction, seeks to achieve a heretic concilliation: the fusion of abstraction in observational drawings. Unlike the elements of informal painting, with the unitarité abstraite practice, Noëll has never abandoned the shape, balance or unitary composition. Conversely, she reconnects them at the breaking point using proportion, tonal harmony and centralised structure.

In 1975, in the Würzburg’s Falkenhaus, the young Jewish girl, who had been expelled from public school under Nazism, formulates her style under the Franco-German reconciliation, initiated some years earlier by De Gaulle and Adenauer. Already, we see the beginnings of a revolution at the heart of Noëll’s pictorial language. A way of working the backgrounds deep in the root of the movement, drawing from it a sculpturally erosive force. In a few paintings, the human form will be drowned in the depths of the world of formation of beings and things. And that is what Noëll is looking for. An unfathomable law, which dates back to the beginning of existence, unified by its elements.

Noëll expresses the transcendental unity through a formalist progression in each media: Figures, Crumples & Creases, Tears & Rips, Concretions, Prints, Fragments or Abrasions. Somehow these techniques brings Noëll closer to the Nouveaux Réalistes who she exhibited with, in 1959, at the first biennial of Paris. Noëll manages to discover the unstable epicenter of all these media to have been confronted repeatedly with the destructive forces of a world left to itself during two wars, a world war & a decolonial war. These tragic events will accentuate a lasting influence in the noëllien subconscious.