PASSAGES
CENTRE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN
9 RUE JEANNE D'ARC — TROYES
In a nutshell…
From 2006 to 2010, Gaël Davrinche enjoyed reinterpreting iconic faces painted by the great masters from the Renaissance to the modern era: from Leonardo da Vinci to Frida Kahlo, via Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Vermeer, Ingres, and Soutine. He emphasized the details that he considered essential, using paint to accentuate certain features or accessories that sometimes relegated the models to the background, as can be seen in his series Portraits and Accessories.
«By revisiting famous works, I detach myself from the subject so as not to let it take precedence over the painting, bringing the painting itself into play and treating it as an equal medium. This raises questions of reincarnation in space and time.»
The excess reaches its peak with the series of seven portraits of Mona Lisa, which the artist sets out to desecrate, even martyr, to the point of driving her to flee LCKCIR, the acronym of the last painting.
Thus deprived of his model, Davrinche turns his attention to the environment, painting flowers at an advanced stage of maturation, just before their petals fall. Anemones, tulips, dahlias, under the artist’s brush, question us about our role in relation to nature as well as our own condition as mortal beings subject to the ravages of time: Memento Mori
«Accessories… but essential.»
Returning to the human figure, Gaël Davrinche focuses on his contemporaries adorned with everyday objects, with heightened rigor and realism. The artist diverts and adorns his models with accessories whose personality is parasitized, erased, once again relegated to the background, allowing him to question the legitimacy of such a genre in the digital age, far removed from the era of commissioned portraits…
Exhibition file : click here
Exhibition open to the public from September 20 to November 15, 2013.
