Lydie Arickx draws and paints with a violence that is, rather, an expressive hyper sensibility. She fears not being able to create in a large way, and makes work using materials that work for her in that moment, be it with brushes, brooms, or her hands. She needs to be able to go hand-in-hand with her pieces, while experiencing a sort of struggle and groups herself with different materials and elements. Her work is focused on motifs that relate to consecrated expression. She pursues this inspiration through her pieces that she makes in the studio.
Her pieces are to be viewed as captured in an immediate confrontation between the world and human beings. Her large scale paintings and sculptures begin at a special moment of communion between object and experience, and are further developed.
Her large paintings of dissected human bodies or large oceans are above all examples of astonishingly large scale developments of her experiences, with all of their intensity. What is most striking is the sense of "coming and going," a kind of repetition that occurs between them. No matter the scale, one could say that sincerity and truth reveal that the artist and her emotions are completely present within the works. Each moment her practice has its own purpose, even if it will be taken up again and placed into another experience. There is a way of being for the artist that cannot be improvised, that is probably not even spontaneous, but comes from an asceticism, a conquest of the self and of one's sensibility.
What is also striking is that the strength of feeling does not envelop anything that is pathos. There is an excess of affect that blunts so many other expressionist approaches. The drawings of dissected bodies, to take the most perilous example, are exceptionally strong but also bear witness to a rejection of the mortuary and the macabre. They are poor human bodies transfigured by the vision of art, brought to another reality by the artist's gaze. Here, as in the landscape drawings, there is a lyrical feeling. The subject triggers a vibration in the artist that leads to a transfiguration, and this transfiguration no longer brings us into the presence of this or that body but of the human and of life in general. Similarly, in Aux, the dance of death becomes the manifestation of the human in general. In the works by Arickx, the elements, nature, and life manifest through a temperament of fire and ice.