Exploring the ‘Incandescence’ of Dorothy Day
In more than 100 paintings, expressionist painter François Rieux depicts Dorothy Day as “the embodiment of a commitment, in all its fragility, light, and solitude.” The exhibit opens in Paris in June.
In Upcoming Exhibit, Rieux Shows Dorothy and Her Milieu in a New Light
An upcoming art exhibit in the heart of Paris invites viewers to encounter Dorothy Day not as an icon or saint, but as a living, breathing embodiment of resistance, vulnerability, and hope.
Running June 3 to July 3 at the Cloître des Billettes, Dorothy Day: Changer l’Ordre Social features more than 100 expressionist paintings by contemporary French artist François Rieux. The series—raw, textured, and emotionally charged—emerges from an eight-year dialogue between Rieux and Jean-Claude Millet, founder of the cultural enterprise Mercurart.
“This is a painting of the human condition: anchored in history, freed from doctrine,” Millet writes in the museum’s curatorial statement. “[François] does not paint faith, but what it demands. He does not paint sainthood, but the refusal to appear saintly. Like Dorothy Day, who rejected the label of ‘saint,’ his painting chooses incandescence over ideals.”
The project began in 2019, after Millet and Mercurart completed a similar project on Marie Durand, a Huguenot French woman persecuted for her beliefs during the eighteenth century. Throughout his dozens of paintings, Rieux explored Dorothy’s spirituality and the political tensions that defined her life.
“She lived her convictions without compromise, in a constant tension between spirituality and political action,” Rieux said in an email to Roundtable, explaining his attraction to Dorothy as a subject. “She never sought to be a heroic figure: she wanted to be faithful to her faith, in the service of others.”
(Rieux responded to questions from Roundtable in French; those answers were translated into English using the DeepL translation service. Millet’s curatorial statement and other comments are from the original English translation.)
Rieux lives and works in the rural region of Ardèche in southern France and paints in a solitary setting that mirrors the quiet intensity of his work. “I’ve been painting for as long as I can remember,” he said, “but I became fully committed to it over time, out of inner necessity.” His style is deeply physical and intuitive, “not so much to represent as to reveal what’s on the surface,” he said. “Each canvas is a plunge, a commitment, an attempt to encounter that which cannot easily be said.”
He says his materials are handled with deliberate urgency as a means of capturing strong emotion. “The material is essential: it carries traces and tensions,” he said.
In his work, Rieux attempted to capture Dorothy’s essence rather than her biography. He wanted his canvases to represent “the embodiment of a commitment, in all its fragility, light, and solitude.”
That commitment is powerfully embodied in the painting La Pacifiste (The Pacifist) based on the iconic photograph of Dorothy sitting on a folding chair, framed by the thighs of two police officers, at the 1973 United Farm Workers strike organized by Cesar Chavez.
The painting depicts Dorothy as a luminous figure dwarfed by the towering police officers. In the face of the dark fencing her in, Millet says Dorothy is:
peaceful but firm, committed but confident […] willing to trade her physical freedom for her freedom to witness to what she has understood about Jesus. She draws from this a paroxysmal capacity for detachment, consubstantial with her conviction. She drank from the source that goes back to our origin: the source of Love that springs from where Man is.
That painting graces the cover of an art book about the exhibit. Dorothy Day: Changing Social Order, published in French and English, combines paintings from the series with reflections by Millet and others, including Martha Hennessy, a Catholic Worker, peace activist, and granddaughter of Dorothy Day.
The book contains a biographical reflection by Baudouin de Guillebon, Élisabeth Geoffroy, and Floriane de Rivaz that introduces Dorothy to a French audience, emphasizing her radicalism and continued relevance. They describe her as a
woman who helps the poor! And who does it in an organized and rather ‘efficient’ way. But, let’s make no mistake, Dorothy is more of a hedgehog than an Abbé Pierre: she stings a little, she disturbs, she annoys, she calls and solicits, even when she has not been called.
Dorothy also touches, she amuses, she moves, she mobilizes, she worries our obviousness, she refuses the fatality of ‘it is so,’ she is reluctant to be satisfied with ‘band-aids on prostheses’ when it is a question of social evils, she shocks, she upsets the (too) instituted things, she questions our social habits and our ways of life, she puts to the test all our professions of faith.
Many of the paintings in the exhibit focus on elements of Dorothy’s milieu. Rieux said he was inspired by scenes of hunger and tenderness. One such scene is La Distribution (Soup Kitchen).
On the right, Rieux depicts a line of indistinct, waiting figures—figures whose biological reality is slowly blurred into abstraction. “We do not see the end of the line; it goes on as far as the eye can see,” writes Millet in a reflection on the painting. Although it recalls the breadlines of the Great Depression, Millet notes the painting was created in 2020—a statement on “the consolidation of all the real or potential queues produced by the present organization of the world.”
On the left, Rieux places two anonymous figures serving food from a central pot. There are no symbols of religious affiliation or organizational identity. “The painter does not want to highlight the houses of hospitality,” Millet observes. “He represents the donors—those toward whom everyone who looks at the painting shows admiration or at least positive feelings.” At the painting’s center is the pot, a shared vessel, rendered as a kind of sacramental object. “Around [it], Humanity is played out by the humanity of the giver and the humanity of the receiver.”
Rieux also made a diptych that reflects on the futility of violence and the spiritual resolve of nonviolence. Both canvases are titled, in English, No War, words that appear in the paintings as an evocation of protest signs often carried by Dorothy and other peace activists.
The first panel seethes with raw emotion: a clenched fist, a grimacing face, a body poised for confrontation. As Millet observes, the features evoke primal instinct—rage, fear, even desperation. “These attitudes are thus little respectful of the cause they are supposed to defend,” Millet writes. “Waging war on war can only be done by using the means that legitimize its denunciation.” The painting captures the trap of righteous aggression, a reaction that risks becoming indistinguishable from the violence it seeks to oppose.
The second panel offers a visual counterpoint—a quiet resistance. Here, the figure cradles the words No War with gentle, protective hands. The mouth is softened with compassion, the posture one of prayerful defense rather than attack. In this figure, Rieux depicts pacifism as a refusal to mirror the aggressor. “To put ‘No War’ in your heart is first to say no to the triggers,” Millet notes. Rather than building higher walls, this image gestures toward the deeper work of replacing fear with hope—embodying a posture of peace not only in politics, but in the soul.
“If we do not want fear, we must not create the conditions for its occurrence,” Millet writes.
Martha Hennessy will speak at a public event on June 26 at Le Dorothy, a Catholic Worker–inspired community space in Paris, in celebration of the month-long exhibit.
To view selections from the exhibit online, visit francoisrieux.com. For exhibit information, see the Cloître des Billettes or Mercurart. Use your browser’s translate feature to access content in English.
All images were used with the permission of the artist.
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