WITH: Félix Bressieux & Aliénor Welschbillig
“… Painting is performance, ritual, living…”.
Félix Bressieux’s paintings are based on a simple, uncluttered language. It’s a protocol-driven process in which the artist remains in the background, letting the dance of a protagonist gesture create and recreate itself. He uses schemas, mathematical and logical systems, sometimes borrowed, sometimes improvised. These schemes and systems organize shapes and colors to extract their essence and strength. The paintings evoke the appearance of scientific experiments, organic images that suggest the existence of a living, self-sufficient universe in each canvas. It’s the research and study of color, of the emotions it arouses, of what is visible and invisible, as seen through a microscope.
Félix mainly uses colored acrylic juices, using only the primary colors. These are added and mixed directly onto the canvas, which he often applies and sprays with a variety of tools, as the painter has banned the use of brushes. The tools he hijacks or makes, as well as his use of canvas as an object, serve to highlight the materiality of painting, its mystical power and question the process of the work. The artist rejects representative, figurative painting, preferring abstraction, which is “opposed to the representation of the visible appearances of the external world”. In this sense, painting should work the eye, not direct it. Shapes are abstract, minimal or non-existent. Color expresses itself; it is both matter and the translator of light, the vector of affect. Color has the ability to reach the depths of the psyche, to touch the absolute… the unspeakable.
Exhibition file: click here
