The turning point, as Bellabstrait tells it, was a single canvas. She had been working toward what she imagined galleries and buyers wanted — legible, approachable, commercially viable. Then she painted La Valkyrie, a figure drawn from Norse mythology, and something shifted. She described the moment in a recent interview conducted in French: "I put a little of myself into this character. And right there, I felt the tipping point — this is what I love to paint, this is what I want to do. Even if it ends up pleasing people less, it's really me." It pleased people considerably more. La Valkyrie and the work that followed it, La Sentinelle, became two of her most well-received paintings. The lesson she drew was direct: painting from the inside out works better than painting toward an imagined audience.
That recalibration is now the foundation of a practice built around semi-figurative forms — protective, morally ambiguous presences set against abstracted grounds of black, white, and gold. Bellabstrait works in acrylic on canvas, with inks, aerosol, and mixed media, often throwing or propelling material onto the surface. The physicality is deliberate. She described the gesture as something that comes out of her — a way of making intensity visible rather than merely implied. The format she returns to most often is 55 by 75 centimetres, which she finds well-suited to the semi-figurative portrait: large enough to hold presence, contained enough to keep it concentrated.
Her background is in fashion design, rather than fine art, and she is self-taught as a painter. She has been working in this medium for around five years, with roughly one year of professional practice. The fashion training — an education in line, volume, fabric weight, and composition — surfaces in how she thinks about a canvas as a structured field rather than a neutral ground. But the actual language of her painting developed through experimentation: what happens when you pour, when you spray, when you build relief rather than paint flat.
Entre les deux mondes — Between Two Worlds — is the work she reached for when asked to describe where the duality in her practice becomes most concrete. The canvas is split horizontally: above, a luminous abstracted cityscape that reads, she said, as if ascending to the sky; below, the same city inverted, burning, dark. She described it as representing the two parts of a person. The composition is direct as a concept, but the interest lies in what she said next: that the duality is less about conflict than about permission. "Even if you are someone good, you can have a dark side inside, and that doesn't mean you let it out. On the contrary, it can help you move forward — as long as you control it." For her, consciousness of that shadow is what gives a painting what she called "a soul."
The figures that populate her more recent canvases — Le Gardien, La Guerrière, L'Invincible — carry this logic into the figurative register. When asked whether the protective figures she paints carry any sense of menace, she pushed back on the word. Not menace, she said, but moral complexity: a figure that wants to do good and will act with force when necessary, without sentimentality toward those it punishes. The distinction matters to her. These are presences that hold both tenderness and severity without resolving the tension between them.
The direction she is moving in, she said, is further into the dark side — while staying at the border of the light. She is not planning a formal shift: same format, same materials, more ideas. The statement is modest in tone but specific in content. She is not describing a reinvention; she is describing a deepening. The work shown at the Traveller's Art Show at Golden Duck Gallery in Budapest in 2026 — L'Égide, a title that translates roughly as the aegis or the shield — fits that trajectory. Résonance Urbaine, entered in the Target Painting Prize in Madrid, reached the semi-final round. Both titles point toward the same territory: protection, force, the city as a charged rather than neutral space.
Impulsion Vitale (2025) offers a useful point of comparison. Recognised by Art4Competition with a fifth-place finish in the abstract category across all mediums and a Coup de cœur distinction, the work belongs to an earlier moment in the series — before the figurative element had fully consolidated. Where the guardian and warrior canvases organise the picture plane around a legible, if ambiguous, human presence, Impulsion Vitale keeps the energy more dispersed: acrylic propelled and poured across the surface, movement recorded rather than directed. The Coup de cœur distinctions that followed for Mouvement Originel and L'Éclosion suggest the jury responded to something consistent across the three works, though what that consistency is — whether it is the physicality of the gesture, the palette, or the sense of contained force — is not something she has specified. The shift from those works to La Valkyrie and La Sentinelle is the clearest evidence of the development she describes: the same intensity, now given a face.
Her institutional commissions — works acquired by the Ville de Saclay and the Domaine de Vaugouard — suggest that the ambiguity she is after reads across different contexts, beyond the gallery circuit alone. Whether that range holds as the work becomes more explicitly dark is a question the practice will have to answer over time. She is scheduled to show at MUSA International Art Expo in Paris in December 2026, with La Sentinelle, and at ARTEXPO Brussels the month before, with Le Gardien, Le Céleste, and L'Obscur. A solo proposal at Galerie Causans in Paris's 6th arrondissement is set for spring 2027. Her work has also appeared in international group contexts including Madrid and Brussels, alongside the Paris-based exhibitions and publications — a circuit that has expanded steadily across a single year of professional practice.
What she wants from a viewer is a particular openness, not a particular reading. She does not want to impose a fixed story; she wants to create presences, emotions, and spaces into which each person can bring their own sensibility. But she is equally clear that the figures have a point of view — they are not neutral. La Valkyrie, for instance, she described as a model: "I want the viewer to see the power of the woman, the warrior — and at the same time, a tenderness and a protection. She can be very strong, but she can be very gentle too, and empathetic." The figure is a proposition, not an open question. The freedom she offers the viewer is in how they relate to that proposition, not in whether the figure stands for something.
There is a practical honesty in how she talks about the early period of her work. She does not frame the shift away from painting-to-please as a spiritual awakening or a creative breakthrough in the conventional sense. She frames it as a discovery that the other approach was not working — and that this one does. The phrasing she uses is almost managerial in its flatness, and that flatness is probably more revealing than a grander account would be. She tested two approaches, one produced better results, she continued with that one.
The series structure of her practice — Impulsion Vitale, L'Éclosion, Mouvement Originel, the guardian and warrior figures — suggests a working method that moves through related problems rather than discrete, unconnected works. Each canvas is also a kind of argument about what the previous one established. La Valkyrie led to La Sentinelle. Entre les deux mondes made explicit a structure that runs underneath much of the rest. The relief-building, the poured and propelled acrylic, the aerosol — these are, by her account, the means by which the intensity she is after becomes physical rather than merely described.
"When you are conscious that you have a dark part," she said, "and especially when you are an artist, you can bring that out in the paintings — and the painting really takes on a soul."
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