ART-PRESENTATION: Dominique Figarella-CU

In the work of Dominique Figarella, the viewer constitutes a most important part of painting as a device. If the painting, as an object, conveys the artist’s emotion and at the same time, the craftsman’s freedom, the work is then defined by the interaction between object, space, and the spectator’s attention. Figarella’s work is akin to a drama, necessarily incomplete—the choice of the staging and the reception of the audience give it its actual dimension.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Anne Barrault Archive

The solo exhibition of Dominique Figarella has the title “CU”. These two letters come from the sentence “Ask me if I C like U” on one of the works, a sentence which takes us straight to the point of the artist’s new proposal for Galerie Anne Barrault. The artist enjoys disrupting ruling aesthetic orders, especially links founded on basic knowledge and rhetorics of substance and materials in the artistic perception of works. Perception is the right notion that comes to mind when observing Dominique Figarella’s work. At first sight, we could be tempted to understand and feel Dominique Figarella’s canvases as purely abstract works, but the artist’s guideline is in itself apt to feed our sensations with a multiplicity of dividing lines. First he covers the canvas with a monochrome layer that he splashes with stains. These stains are random and free, only slightly controlled by the artist’s whim in a lose gesture. The artist comes to meet his painting, but then leaves. He could have stopped there, and name it Action Painting or Dripping. The surface of Dominique Figarella’s canvas becomes the battlefield of different points of view, both aesthetic and material, as well as the borderline between different artistic gestures, from abstraction to figurative, in a multiplicity of fields of expression. Dominique Figarella develops his complex art made of personal decisions and accidents, in which gestures and stains are staged in an abstract process aiming at the representation of the act of painting.

Info: Info: Galerie Anne Barrault, 51 rue des Archives, Paris, Duration: 3/9-15/10/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galerieannebarrault.com