"Mañana Mañana/ Waiting for the sun" Painting

Joëlle Moureau (1990) is a Belgian based emerging artist, born and raised at the coast. After moving to the city of Antwerp, Joëlle started making paintings, mainly of a figurative, contemporary nature.

The artist has been developing her own painting style, with somewhat naïve perspectives and often layered acrylic colour effects, on a self-taught basis. A big inspiration hereby was the 19th century painting scene, with artists such as Van Gogh, Gaugin, Lautrec, Chagall, etc...

“What intrigues me in art, is when there’s a soul in a painting. For me paintings are in some way an extension of the painter. My art is often a reflection of my own feelings, which give the paintings their atmosphere.”

Themes in Joëlle’s work are the little man/woman in the street, own life experiences, nights at the pub, stories and places that speak to her imagination as well as places where she lived. These scenes are often a mix of reality and fiction.

In 2022, Joëlle’s work was selected for the Yoc open call and shown at a group show in Galerie Dessers (Hasselt). This was followed by a solo show 'Unknow Pleasures' (November 2023) at gallery Art-Uur (Lier). Paintings for this show were created under the influence of the music of Joy Division, from the debut album 'Unknown Pleasures'. The series was essentially an ode to life and its moments of (secret) pleasure, where joie de vivre is portrayed in an innocent, almost naive way. This seems to be a recurrent theme in the artist’s paintings, which often reflect certain inner atmospheres. Deep emotions of (shared) happiness and sadness alternate with solitary landscapes. A deeper theme underneath is the discrepancy between being part of society on the one hand and wanting to drop out of it on the other. A longing for freedom which is found in the vastness of nature.

Joëlle’s latest expo, ‘From Dawn till Dusk’, took place at Kavka (Antwerp) in 2025 and revolved around the Sun and its ever continuous and fascinating process of rising and setting. Underlying inspiration for both shape and colors in the paintings came from interior objects from the 1970s' Space Age. Central to this exposition, are questions on the origin of Sun and Sunrise, whether a Sun(rise) is born, and how. Questions of which the artist decided she had no intention of researching them scientifically, but of which she chose to fill the voids with imagination instead.