Cecile Defforey splits her time between Brussels, Belgium, and Brookhaven, New York – overlooking Fire Island. While Brussels is the traditional home of René Magritte and Marcel Broodthaers, Brookhaven quietly houses a community of artists and art professionals who similarly lend to Defforey’s approach. Both homes influence Defforey’s working methods in subtle ways. Collage techniques – such as leaves to represent the antlers of a deer – as well as cryptic text inscribed over drawings, casually call on the Belgian surrealists. Her flowing, oblique compositions, meanwhile, recall American contemporaries such as Malcolm Morley, similarly an ‘adventure painter’. 

Other curious details in Defforey’s works become apparent upon closer inspection: flecks of gold begin to reveal themselves as stamps of animal heads, creating depth to her foregrounds but also acting as found objects in and of themselves. The stamps utilized here are another layer of outside influence, perhaps acquired during her travels, or maybe at a local antique shop.

Cecile Defforey’s works are also remarkable for their breadth of material: paint, gold leaf, crayon, and watercolor are used interchangeably, signaling fluidity in Defforey’s working method. Marks are made instinctively and expressively, while the edges of the paper are rarely reached. This seems significant: if these works are to be considered narrative, then their informality hints at retention of mystery. She gives us a glimpse of a story, but coyly declines to elaborate. As in dreams, where we are asked to take uncanny yet deeply familiar situations for granted only to have them flit away at the turn of a head, Defforey offers her scenes to us as if they might disappear as quickly as they appear. Just as she invites us into one of her frolicking beach scenes or encounters with a mermaid, the treatment of the image suggests that it is temporal, that we ought not read too far into what she unfolds to her viewers.