Edith Lassiat's works strike us by the power of fragileness of their surfaces, pigments and forms, which seem to find their origins in the soul of mankind and the earth itself. They form a continuous effort to transcend knowledge, ranging from one's own body and the techniques to live one's life, to the traces of man's search for truth and beauty.
Lassiat's works, all of them realized with earth pigments, appear to us as a permanent unfolding of light, which material is generally considered as being the origin and basic condition of life. Fragments of images and handwritten texts are organically integrated within a game of opaque and translucent layers.

Developed in series, the paintings and paper works, all realized in human formats, read as a "journal intime", a personal diary, imposing a respectful distance and intensive view at the same time. Each individual piece evoke an intimacy reminding us of late medieval "Andachtsbilder" small scale religious images meant for private devotion. Still, the works of Edith Lassiat cannot be interpreted without regarding them as parts of a whole, which can neither be known nor named. Each work, each series, form an ongoing process in which the artist captures ãslicesä of life's creation, which is an ongoing process by itself.

She does not re-present, but presents elements of life through its very materialness (i.e. the act of creating works). The seductive quality of these works is based on their fragmented character and the relative space of time in which they came to life. It is through this generous illusion, that Lassiatâs works impose their realities among the realities around.

Adriaan Himmelreich
Maastricht, January, 2006