Sibylle in her studio The stunningly dense pointillist drawings by Belgian, Cyprus-based artist Sibylle are at once minutely complex and strikingly clear. Made up of thousands of individual ink dots—on average, 2,500 per square inch—each portrait of an animal or person offers a seemingly endless level of detailed, meticulously applied and layered patterns to investigate and unpack. Despite all those degrees of execution and rendering, though, Sibylle presents her subjects in a stark, almost confrontational style. Wild and domesticated animals, and people from unknown places and times look directly at the viewer, sometimes with a blank expression, elsewhere with tired, pleading eyes or a focused intensity.

Sibylle’s style of realism—with its extreme details that, in a manner reminiscent of Chuck Close, never seek to simulate photographic objectivity—crafts very iconic images out of a highly complex aesthetic practice. A self-trained artist, she first encountered the Seurat dot system at the age of 11 while growing up in France, but only took up the style for her own pursuits in 2003. Since then, she’s developed a unique strand of pointillism that favors an increasingly multi-toned palette that sometimes only features black dots and elsewhere uses several shades at once. In a manner similar to Seurat, Paul Signac, and other early practitioners of the style, Sibylle’s works on paper play dazzling yet subtle light tricks.

By stripping her compositions to the elemental contrast between dark and bright, color and its absence, she creates deceptively simple and spectacularly gripping pieces. Her networks of dots convey a haunting sense of texture and movement that seems at odds with the medium.

Peering in closer, new features and surfaces emerge, new degrees of execution and levels of information. Sibylle’s subjects seem both mysterious and open to close scrutinizing, as though peeling back the endless layers and levels of spot will eventually reveal them in their truest form. As we deconstruct the dots and seek out the spaces between them, Sibylle’s portraits suggest the intangible complexities of the subjects they portray.

www.sibyllestudio.com

www.Agora-Gallery.com/ArtistPage/Sibylle.aspx