As she paints, Angèle Verret pours coat over coat of lightly coloured acrylic onto a support on which she works horizontally. She drips the viscous liquid on the «neutral» surface and lets it produce images ; like light casting shadows, the pigment soon reveals residues, scrapes and depths present on the support but invisible to the naked eye. In the course of the work, the liquid coats also integrate temperature and drying variations, multiply accidents, folds, drips, bubbles and stripes through their accumulation, and equally collects the painter’s pentimentos, refusals, hopes and regrets so that the final layer carries the memory of all its predecessors. And to these unexpected events the artist even adds other random elements, which she provokes through uncontrolled gestures and which she chooses for their effects, adding until she is completely lost in unknown territory. «I begin my work in the studio by uprooting myself», she says. «I want to smell, feel and see painting as if I had never seen, heard or painting before».

By thwarting her senses, Angèle Verret in fact frees her mind from any active search for meaning, rather putting it in a state of wandering and roaming. For her, meaning therefore has to do with intuitive unveiling, with revelation, more than with deliberate construction. But what is striking in this form of painting is that its wandering leads to genuine trompe-l’œil, to simultaneous illusions of moving substances and photography, of earthly crusts and heaventy vaults, of mountains and skin pores that all represent, first and foremost, the adventure of painting itself and that contribute to draw us nearer to indeterminate zones of reality. Their repeated passages from the infinitesimal to the infinitely great also allow us to understand  that the smallest particle of matter conceals the entire cosmos and to see for an instant, as clearly as the micro-accidents on the canvas, how we are but mere transient specks of dust carried by the wind, the rain and light.

Anne-Marie Ninacs,
Curator of contemporary art and of the Prêt d’oeuvres d’art collection, MNBAQ (2002-2006)
Text panel for the exhibition Proceeding in the fog, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. 2004