Each work becomes the source of a new work: painting, photography and digital recomposition.
Artistic approach
A fragment is not an incomplete part of the work, but a potential work in itself.
My work grows out of a process of continuous transformation. Each work becomes the source of a new one, in a cycle where painting, photography and digital recomposition are in constant dialogue.
The starting point is a large original painting. I then photograph details of it: fragments chosen for their visual and emotional potential. These fragments are enlarged, rearranged, combined with other images or natural elements, then transformed digitally. Some of these details in turn become the subject of a new painting.
This process can repeat endlessly. Every fragment holds the possibility of a work of its own, and every work carries the seeds of a future transformation.
The domino metaphor makes this chain of images easy to follow, but my approach goes further, exploring visual memory, metamorphosis, fragmentation and rebirth. The work is no longer a fixed object but an organism in constant evolution.
I see painting as a living matter able to regenerate itself. By isolating, enlarging, recomposing and repainting certain details, I reveal worlds that remained hidden in the original image. Each series is a visual map of an evolving process, where the origin stays present while constantly changing.
Evolving fragmentism
A painting, its fragments, and the works born from them. Each image carries the next one within it.
Domino Process – Evolving fragments
Create a painting, cut out a fragment, rotate it, invert it: the process in four gestures.
The large portrait and its fragments: reds, yellows and blues travelling from one painting to the next.
Painted faces, fragments and printed fabrics, with a photograph of a forest and a fence.
Crumpled plastic, a deeply folded canvas and green paint that becomes a flower.
Drawn silhouettes, a canvas turned over: the back becomes the front, all the way to the installation.
Travel notebooks
Each journey becomes a domino: techniques learned elsewhere, photographs taken on site, then fragments that come back to the studio in Belgium.
Senegal → Morocco → Belgium
In Senegal, batik: wax, brush and indigo bath, alongside a local craftsman. Details photographed there are printed on fabric, then repainted in the studio. On one side the canvas, on the other the fabric and the outfit.
From painting to garment
The large canvas leaves the wall and becomes something to wear.
The red-orange canvas becomes Africa, lands on the bath towel, then breaks into facets on the T-shirt.
The flower on the canvas breaks into fragments, then settles on the T-shirt.
Domino game
The dominoes from my final-year (6th year) work, presented in the art history class at the École des arts de Braine-l'Alleud.
A painting gives rise to fragments, which give rise to other paintings. The film follows this path, season after season.
Fabienne Penninck
Biography
Painting has always been part of Fabienne Penninck's world, but the covid period was especially inspiring, and also saw her create video montages based on her paintings.
Her work is marked by a strong physical gesture: strokes of brush, knife and broom, erasing, splashes… Speed of movement and spontaneity, the importance of matter, work on light and colour, with inspiration drawn from nature, the sea and its magnificent sunsets.
A jazz saxophonist at the Tubize Academy for four years, she finds in music the improvisation that feeds her gesture. Music also enters her painting through a vibrating gesture, with ever bolder and more spontaneous brushstrokes: pure improvisation and experimental letting go, including in portraiture. Through her choice of textures and supports, her painting also appeals to touch.
Fabienne Penninck's practice is built on a dialogue between painting, photography and digital recomposition. Her work explores how images transform, through a process she calls evolving fragmentism (fragmentisme évolutif). Starting from original paintings, she creates new works by isolating details, reinterpreting them and letting them evolve into new forms. Her approach questions the relationship between the fragment and the whole, between the work and its metamorphosis.
Artistic career
Residency at the Jacques Franck cultural centre (2020), the Ishango Oratorio, Le Delta, Namur (2022) and The EGG Brussels with the Fabrice Mukuna Band (2025).
In the art history class at the École des arts de Braine-l'Alleud, Fabienne Penninck presents her final-year work to her fellow students and professor Anne Deliège. The printed canvas is unfolded, lifted and turned over. The back becomes the front.
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