n Annabelle Drory's painting there are places and elements we believe we recognise without ever being quite able to situate them. A horizon line, a few reliefs, structures reduced to their essential forms. In her marine paintings, the visible world is subjected to a slow work of effacement. Details disappear, volumes simplify, architectures become blocks of colour. Between figuration and abstraction, Annabelle Drory no longer leads the gaze towards a precise point; it lingers in the expanse and suggests. Her paintings are often organised around a dominant horizontality. The sky occupies a considerable place, while the earth, the water or the structures contract into the lower part of the canvas. These proportions give the void an almost physical presence. The landscape is no longer the setting for an action: it becomes the event itself. The palette — bluish greys, water green, chalky whites and deep blues — restores the particular atmosphere of the North. The light fixes no precise hour. The landscape seems caught in an indeterminate duration, between appearance and effacement. A few accents of ochre, red or black interrupt the chromatic continuity and introduce a tension into the horizontality. These isolated forms lend the landscape an enigmatic, at times almost narrative presence. A simple shoreline can tip, almost imperceptibly, into abstraction. These marine paintings by Annabelle Drory bring Marguerite Duras to mind. Annabelle Drory shares with Duras's writing the same use of silence, of waiting and of absence. Here too, the landscape seems to wait. Something has withdrawn, yet remains perceptible. And this silence is at times eloquent. The deep subject of this marine painting is perhaps not so much the landscape as the threshold: the boundary between sky and earth, presence and disappearance, the said and the unsaid, figuration and abstraction. On the whole, Annabelle Drory paints less the exact reality of a place than the memory we may keep of it, or the meaning we are free to give it. From it emanates a meditative, slightly melancholic atmosphere, in which the void plays a role as important as the elements depicted. In her abstract works, Annabelle Drory no longer seeks so much to represent a place as to bring a space into being. The painting gradually frees itself from the observable landscape to build its own territory, made of coloured masses, lines, fragments and traces. Though the horizon sometimes remains perceptible, it is no longer the description of a specific expanse: it becomes a principle of organisation, a pretext for conveying what she feels. Annabelle Drory works in a constant balance between construction and intuition. The palette knife lays down the colour, but can also remove it, displace it or erode it. The painting is built through a succession of decisions, observations and responses to what arises on the canvas. The reworkings, the transparencies and the accidents are not concealed: they fully take part in the image and give it its depth. Here too the void plays an essential role: it is not a passive background but an active space that allows the forms to breathe and determines their intensity. This way of proceeding produces an abstraction that never breaks completely with the sensory world. The landscape is therefore not absent: it has been internalised. It persists as sensation, rhythm and memory; it suggests a message without formulating it. It is offered to the viewer's interpretation and imagination. Sometimes the composition fragments further. Interrupted lines and partially covered surfaces establish a discontinuous perception. The eye moves about without being able to reconstitute a single image. The line itself seems to hesitate between contour, writing and trajectory. As with Paul Klee, it may be understood as a movement before being a boundary: it crosses space, opens a passage and goes on suggesting. Annabelle Drory's work thus lies in an in-between space: between the visible and the invisible, premeditation and accident, stability and disappearance, the said and the unsaid. Her paintings do not deliver a fixed image. They give us to see a process in the course of which forms emerge, transform, and always remain liable to fade away. Their strength lies in this openness. Nothing is imposed, yet nothing is left to chance. The painting offers thresholds and directions that each viewer is free to inhabit. It no longer represents the world: it retains certain fundamental experiences of it — light, distance, the passing of time, the vagaries of existence, the fragile persistence of things — in order to recompose them in a language that has become fully pictorial.