The artist has always found her inspiration among nature itself because, as she puts it, ‘apart from some works of art and faces, it is a unique place where all kinds of feelings and emotions constantly recur, and it is a place where beauty lies.

Its relation to nature is quite peculiar: it is an osmosis, a permanent and necessary exchange. The artist uses an element of this nature as a pretext for creation and the painting is part of a space-time. Space is delimited by the frame of the painting and by the space of the workshop, but time itself is very vast. Time is the story of the intrinsic artist linked to that of humanity, the time of memories, but also the time necessary for work, to bring forth the work. "A very long time," she said, "but it is the same time that produces the succession of seasons, which causes the fallen leaves of the trees to pile up for the ancient humus of the earth. Each layer of paint is a memory for the painting, and the accumulation of layers, in the necessary time, a creative humus. This work is part of the duration, the accumulation and the slowness.

There is no figuration properly spoken, no illusionism (or representation), just an intrinsic knowledge of the subject and the craft.

Laure Le Chapelier (2010) writer

We are stuck by the great oils on canvas with their lush vegetations. Simplifying form, Odile Boniface has kept clear of the traps of mastery over stroke and technique. That’s why we can see vast patches of silence where the patient work of matter and the exalting of colour may approach abstraction at times. It’s a work on paper, of great pictural richness, a “mixed technique” of ink, crayons and oil. It reveals subtle shades, the result of a passage and osmosis between real and imaginary, both a Chinese print and a fresco, wich conveys a very acute insight on the verge of the named world.

C.Zollner (2005) journalist

Odile Boniface graduated from the school of fine arts in Paris and embraced abstract painting: a period of luminous and temperate works, marked by atmospheric  suggestions. Then she left the capital to reconsider her pictural project.

Since abstraction proved unsatisfying, and since her new residence played a compensatory part, she gradually turned towards the interpretation of the obvious, which she perceives now both in the visible world and her imaginary world, like travel impressions drawn from exotic forests.

She affronts these territories from the outside and inside, for she unveils their hidden sap, their acrid perfume, the dampness of their foliage. Reality lightens, the field of vision expands, thus setting every element at its due place, enhanced by the luminous fluidity of virgin spots, empty spaces. An apparent silence reigns over those barren landscapes which, in a modest and moving way, tell us of the wildlife; the idea intervenes in the filter of reality only to highlight the pertinacy of what is conveyed. The deftness of her drawing, her keen knowledge of tones and the subtle placing of forms convey life and meaning to the painting. In all its wanderings, the figure-be it monkey, bird or lizard-becomes pretext and Odile Boniface gives life and depth to her universe.

Gérard Xuriguera (1993) art critic

For 20 years Odile Boniface has been painting. It is  a long maturing  process ,sometimes painful, always unperceived, in silence and  solitude, often in doubt.The work of a craftsman and artist, demanding, ignoring the time spent, never satisfied, never finished because always perfectible.

From the former abstract paintings to the figurative latter ones, her work is a genesis: from the primal silence original point ,line ,chaos, questioning of the coloured matter, has emerged  form , landscape, animal, a world between the real and the imagined.

The monkeys are there, motionless ,as signs of the inevitable human presence, as part and parcel of nature itself. They interrogate.Today they blend or disappear in the lushness of the  vegetation. Symbolism is left to the onlooker's eyes. Inner light of he painter, richness of the sensations enhanced by colour, transparency and matter, vibration of air and water, since long ago, slowly, life has taken form... There is a sense of achievement in the latter works.

Marie Legent (1993) journalist

Her clear eyes have dived into the imaginary matter in order to convey how its depth looks like. The elegance of her brush stokes has subdued the forms to her reality and constantly inspired the movement of a new day. All this occurred from dusk to dawn. Her vision has printed on the canvas a post diluvian landscape, fantastic and barren, one of eruption, chaos.

Her work is an alchemy and the canvas vibrates with a variety of tones and shades. Genesis or terra incognita, before or after, always, the time of peace in between. We see rocks that no longer are, rivers in the desert, remote plains, informal mountains, beaches at low tide caught in the net of the horizon. Infinite softness of a planetary meditation, perpetual slowness.

Poet, she upsets her instinct with an awareness of the tragic.

She as the purity of youth and experience of years of work. She has the power of a parabolic love that she conveys by playing extensively with the colours, in a cellular and organic unity which patiently redefines the space where eye hand and the weight of the soul meet.

Claude Sorel (1980) writer and poet

Salle Péguy, Odile boniface's paintings put us on the same level with a world that is not our finite and constructed universe. Abstract painting, of course, but of an abstract which is space, with vast movement, in which molten forms emerge seeking balance in the crackle of lively and original energy.

Colors themselves evoke this beginning. By the cold, Antarctic colors, coming from the gray of nothingness, and the dominance of mauve in all its variations, isn't it a transition that is expressed, from emptiness to birth, to life, fire red? The color seems to develop, to emerge as on the painter's palette.

Odile Boniface captures the beginning in its immensity, but also in its microscopic finesse; This second impression is particularly suggested by the pastels where the lines and the bridges seem agitated with a very microbial life. Here the painter multiplies the visions of stratifications, of cracks similar to the folds of an organic fabric: "lines in topside and upside down ".

"The canvas is done gradually," she says, "no preconceived project, therefore no background", and her painting develops a cosmological space driven by powerful and larger forces; living forces that contradict each other, gushing and falling back, flowing and exploding, painting the movement in a shower of colored spots, seeking to regroup in denser forms calling in their quest for balance, construction, the slight line that seems to end, that supports all.

In the blackboard, this calm eye-circle carries, in the slowness of its formation, the mystery of this world, whose dynamism perhaps finds its source in the imperative necessity which pushes Odile Boniface to paint what is her inner world.

Jacqueline Raynaud (1979) art critic

We have seen on display twenty recent paintings by Odile Boniface, whose youth does not exclude, surprisingly, maturity and technical mastery.

Matter is his subject. It is not about coloring a shape, but about working (in) the material until the shape takes place, on its own. They are large oil paintings where a grainy, mineral or aquatic chaos unfolds, where a landscape of limbo is revealed, from beyond; or small surfaces in ink, oil pastels, gouaches: knotty, rough as bark, imprints like engravings. The cut, the tear, the slit, the notching, run through these canvases like a theme: glimpsing lips, sketched vulva, barely open wound, effervescent bulge that a line bursts. The tension up to the vibration materializes in diptychs or triptychs. Finally, poems add to the dramatic aspect of this young work when calligrams penetrate the color of their drawing, when a palimpsest gives the word to the material, lending sound to this universe where the female unconscious is inscribed.

Pierre Rambaud (1979) Galerie St Paul