Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Diane Dal-Pra paints as if time itself had frozen in oil painting, creating images that breathe without ever catching their breath. Born in Périgueux in 1991, now based in Paris, this artist constructs paintings that act like camera obscuras where light enters only through imperceptible cracks. Her large canvases, because Dal-Pra works large, very large, capture this suspended moment between waking and sleeping, between presence and absence, between body and object.
Dal-Pra’s work intensely dialogues with the philosophy of the fold elaborated by Gilles Deleuze in his book “The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque” published in 1988 [1]. For Deleuze, the fold is never a mere ornament: it is a way of thinking about the world as matter in perpetual undulation, where everything folds, unfolds, refolds. Dal-Pra seizes this idea with a rare pictorial intelligence. In her compositions, textiles are not mere decorative accessories but full philosophical entities. A crumpled sheet becomes a territory of metaphysical investigation. A folded tablecloth contains universes. Look how, in her recent paintings, fabrics create what Deleuze would call cavities of intimacy, those spaces where inside and outside become indistinguishable. Drawn curtains hide nothing; they rather reveal the fundamental ambiguity of all separation. A woman sinks her head into a luminous lampshade, and the fold between flesh and matter is abolished. The body literally evaporates into the light, leaving behind that misty trace that Dal-Pra masters with devilish precision.
What makes Dal-Pra’s work so relevant in the contemporary context is her ability to visually translate Deleuze’s notion of the infinite fold without ever falling into servile illustration. She does not paint “the concept”; she paints “with” the concept. Her female figures with broad shoulders and thick braids gradually disappear into the folds of sheets, tablecloths, veils. The artist thus creates an undecidable zone, neither quite presence nor quite absence. These monumental bodies that dissolve question our relationship with domestic objects that simultaneously define and devour us. Dal-Pra is superstitious, she says herself, and this superstition is not anecdotal: it is the conceptual engine of her work. Objects have power. They shape our identity as much as they threaten to engulf us. In this logic, the fold becomes the plastic operator that allows thinking about this double nature, this double movement of identity construction and dissolution.
The titles of her works, “Eternal Interval”, “From Solid to Gaseous” and “Voids Refuge”, act as cryptic instructions for reading these transformations. They suggest that emptiness itself could be a sanctuary, a livable space rather than a threat. In the exhibition “No Room for Emptiness” presented in Milan at the beginning of 2025, Dal-Pra pushes this logic to its breaking point. The title promises a suffocating fullness, but the artist completely subverts this expectation. She courts the void, plays with it, stretches it until it becomes tangible. Her paintings exist in a state of magnificent instability: the bodies shimmer, entering and exiting form. This is not lazy minimalism; it is a sophisticated choreography between full and empty, between matter and vapor.
But Dal-Pra’s conceptual virtuosity would not suffice without her astonishing technical mastery. This is where her second dialogue begins, that with the masters of the Italian Renaissance. Dal-Pra regularly cites these painters as major influences, and this lineage is not mere worldly name-dropping. It fits within a very precise technical tradition: that of sfumato and glazes. Sfumato, the Italian word meaning “smoky”, is the painting technique that Leonardo da Vinci perfected, producing such soft transitions between shadows and lights that no contour is perceptible. Leonardo himself described sfumato as painting “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke.” Dal-Pra applies this lesson with a rigor that commands respect. Her translucent surfaces, these veils, these fogged windows, and these drops of water on a braid, are painted with a finesse that would have made Leonardo nod in approval. Oil painting, with its slow drying time, allows these infinite overlays of transparent layers that create depth and volume. Dal-Pra exploits this property of the medium with monastic patience.
Look closely at her paintings: the brushstrokes are imperceptible. The surface is smooth, almost supernatural. This is the result of tens of hours of meticulous work, layer after layer, gliding between realism and abstraction. A wooden platter is rendered with photographic precision, then suddenly it adjoins a zone of pure sfumato, where the form dissolves into an atmospheric haze. This juxtaposition is never a problem with Dal-Pra; it is her signature. She intuitively understands that memory works exactly that way: some details emerge with brutal sharpness while the rest bathes in indistinct blur. Her compositions recall the four canonical modes of Renaissance painting, cangiante, chiaroscuro, sfumato and unione, but Dal-Pra reinvents them for our age of screens and chronic insomnia.
Because yes, insomnia. Dal-Pra speaks openly about it: she suffers from insomnia, and this semi-conscious state deeply permeates her work. Those moments when one is neither fully awake nor truly asleep, when familiar objects in the room take on unsettling presences. That is exactly what her paintings capture. There is something oppressive in these muted atmospheres, in the thick silence reigning in her compositions. A woman lays her head on a table, a veil of white lace resting on her braided hair like a nuptial shroud. The image immediately evokes Sylvia Plath and her oven, this surrender that may be no more than a refuge. But Dal-Pra refuses any specific narrative. She does not tell stories; she creates atmospheres, tones, colors of moments. As she herself says, explaining the initial idea of a painting is as complicated as telling a dream: it is defined more by sensations than by narration.
Dal-Pra’s color palette, with its muted tones, beiges, pearl grays, and off-whites, reinforces this atmosphere of temporal suspension. Nothing is vivid, nothing shouts. It is a painting of whispers, of the in-between, of the twilight zone. Her monumental figures possess a sculptural presence that recalls classical statues, elevated to the status of timeless icons. Yet paradoxically, these same figures are on the verge of disappearing, of evaporating into the folds of the textiles surrounding them. This tension between solidity and dissolution is what makes Dal-Pra’s work so powerfully contemporary. At a time when our identities are constantly built and deconstructed by the objects we collect, the filters we apply, the images we project, Dal-Pra questions the extent to which our material possessions influence our inner balance.
Her major exhibitions, at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, at Massimo de Carlo in London and Milan, and at MOSTYN in Wales, have all confirmed what was evident from her first paintings: we are faced with an artist who thinks in painting. Not an artist who illustrates philosophical ideas, but a painter whose intelligence is exercised directly through the medium. She works slowly, very slowly. A painting can take months. This slowness is not a studio affectation; it is a technical and conceptual necessity. To create these imperceptible transitions, these surfaces that seem to hold their breath, time is needed. Collectors have to wait, sometimes up to nine months, to receive a work. But this waiting is part of the process. Dal-Pra dilates time when she paints: eight hours of work can feel like seventy-two hours of absence. She hopes that her paintings will also dilate time for the viewer, creating those moments of suspension when spatial and temporal landmarks waver.
Dal-Pra’s work also questions our contemporary relationship to image and visual identity. By systematically masking the faces of her figures, heads pressed into lampshades, immersed in aquariums, and hidden under fabrics, she rejects the cult of facial recognition that obsesses our image-saturated era. But this refusal is not a reaction to social networks, as one might naively believe. It is the logical continuation of her reflection on engulfment. Each portrait speaks of this ambivalent relationship to objects: they powerfully define our identities but simultaneously become an armor that devours us. By hiding faces, Dal-Pra gives more presence to our absence, emphasizing that despite everything, of course, we are there.
This artist, whose work is already included in the collections of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the Hirshhorn Museum, the ICA Miami, and the Yuz Museum, has built in less than a decade a coherent and profoundly original body of work. She did not follow the traditional academic path of fine arts; she studied design in Bordeaux and applied arts, which perhaps gives her this technical freedom, this ability to experiment without the paralyzing weight of academic orthodoxy. Yet, she possesses an almost reverential respect for the history of oil painting, this medium used for centuries, whose historical dimension has “something fascinating and timeless,” she says.
Diane Dal-Pra creates tender totems from our household waste, from those fleeting moments that leave only traces. Her paintings are still lifes in the deepest sense, Stilleben, these “silent lives” that step away from the agitated reality to precipitate time into sculptural existences charged with volume and weight. In the folds of her canvases, one finds temporal crevices where one can disconnect from the now, evoking memories, perceptions, and imaginations. It is painting that thinks, breathes, and waits.
If contemporary art needs something today, and I’m not even sure it needs anything, it might be this ability to slow down, to stop, to really look. Diane Dal-Pra offers us this pause. Her paintings absorb the sound of the room, creating these bubbles of silence where the mind can drift. In a world that constantly screams, demanding our attention every second, turning images into disposable goods, Dal-Pra creates objects that require time. Objects that do not give themselves immediately, that do not shout their intentions. Paintings that whisper and, precisely for this reason, deserve to be approached and listened to. Here is an artist who understands that the power of painting lies in its ability to create alternative durations, temporalities other than the incessant flow. Her canvases are refuges, sanctuaries, spaces where emptiness is not an absence but a dense and draped presence. And that, in our era saturated with hollow images, is an act of resistance as much as an act of beauty.
- Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1988.
