Already during her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, which she completed in 1958, Gisèle Van Lange was happy to portray portraits and also painted landscapes, still lifes or urban views, which immediately testified of an astonishing formal mastery. In dark colour ranges, contrasting with the pale complexions for portraits, the artist models her subject with a nervous touch and a somewhat bumpy outline, probably inherited from a Soutine, that at the time she particularly admires. The fawn and expressionist synthesis she imposes on her subjects leads her very quickly to the edge of abstraction. Like a Nicolas de Staël whose work she discovered around 1959, Gisèle Van Lange "abstracted" such architecture, landscape or utensil, now deleted from their third dimension, by placing large plans on the canvas. colourful with generous impasto and the enlarged touch, resulting from a dynamic and expressive gesture. It is such works that she presents during a first personal exhibition in Paris in 1960. Her travels in Spain and France, especially in the Dordogne, give her the opportunity to seize on the spot the essence of a landscape or a plant massif, but that it will decant and re-interpret through the lens of its own apprehensions.
