French, born in 1971, Gaël Davrinche graduated in painting from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Davrinche is an internationally recognized prolific and eclectic painter with a dense career of solo exhibitions in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Canada and China. His works have been acquired by the Musée Ingres of Montauban, the FRAC and the Fondation Salomon pour dell'arte contemporain. Among his most recent exhibitions, Défigure (s) at the Fondation Ecureuil in Toulouse, Memento Mori at the Ego Gallery in Lugano and Insight, at the Magda Danysz gallery in Shanghai.
A marked dichotomy invades his entire production: sense of humor and solemnity, instinctual trait and meticulous description, historical-artistic quotation and narration of the contemporary. How did your marked interest in great works of art, especially portraits, painted by the masters of the past come about?
«Since the beginning of the new millennium I have begun to regain possession of the history of art, combining a touch of irony with this interesting research. From Leonardo to Raphael, from Van Eyck to Dürer, there are many works by the great masters of the past that I have intimately uncovered, studied, deconstructed, broken down and investigated, making them my own and then reinterpreting them in a contemporary key. These paintings above all want to offer insights of a visual nature on the cyclical nature of art and in particular on the men and women who lived it and who by virtue of their strong personality, have made people talk about themselves and will continue to do so, now as then. . A relationship, that with the great masters, which also consists in the appropriation and mixing of famous works through the playful and witty eyes of a child ».
In any case, his works run through a whirlwind variety of styles, techniques and subjects dealt with almost without a pre-established order: from the canvases and papers of the Kalashnikov series, full of violent gestures, to the surprising large hyper-realistic portraits, where his mastery reaches the its highest expression.
«In the Kalashnikov series I wanted to deconstruct human faces by indicating how our gaze and our understanding must not be diverted from appearances. Under that human-shaped shell may be the fiercest beast, waiting for opportunities to devour the rationality of human nature. In these expressionist portraits, the ferocity of the brushstrokes therefore tends to dissolve the forms and make them almost mental. The glances lost in time are instead the leitmotif of my hyper-realistic portraits. Proud, composed men and women reveal my interest in humanity. The individual and his role, his attitude, are figured and summarized in attributes that are only apparently incongruous, but which have the symbolic function of illuminating the character's activity, his relationship with the world and with others, aspirations and contradictions. Thus the portraits are scattered with objects that express the duality between being and appearing. I tried to insert the element of irony in this celebration of dignity that remains suspended between sarcasm and seriousness. It is a series of large-format paintings that show the embodiment of classical and Renaissance art to the point of evoking the Girl with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci, for example, or the Man in a Turban by Jan Van Eyck ».
This particular dialogue that you establish with great works of art of the past has also been the subject of an interesting exhibition in Lugano ...
«Aion Art Space and Ego Gallery have created an imaginary dialogue in Lugano, two Popes and two artists. I was thus able to establish a relationship with Tiziano Vecellio, one of the masters of the art of the sixteenth century, comparing two concrete personalities, with a strong character, expressive traits and strategic importance for what concerns the new Italy and the new Europe. of the Renaissance: two popes with much in common. The Portrait of Paul III Farnese is one of Titian's most famous paintings and several versions are known, both autographed and executed with the help of the workshop. My work is instead inspired by Julius II, painted by Raffaello Sanzio at the beginning of the 500th century. A warrior pope, whose eyes are here almost completely covered by the headdress, in which the posture is modest, tired and suffering and whose only clear and defined details are the rings he wears on his fingers. The opposite of what Raphael tried instead, who had to support the public image of a pope with such a controversial character. The exhibition was completed by other paintings of mine, such as Marguerite in the two versions in blue and white, paintings freely inspired by Velazquez, but where the princess seems to float and slowly dilute over time ».
Alongside her famous portraits, she painted an original series of flowers collected under the title of “Memento Mori”. What significance do these works have in your artistic path?
«With“ Memento Mori ”I wanted to represent the flowers that dissolve, that are dying, leaving room for a new seed. I tried to capture and fix the moment when the beauty of nature reminds us of the insignificance and transience of our life. These flowers (tulips, anemones, lilies) that seem to struggle against time in the last phase of their life just before the petals fall. The black rain on the bottom weighs on these allegories of the passing of time, of the vanities that encourage us to live the present with intensity until the fading of beauty. Mementomori is the poignant dedication to the impermanence of all things. Finally, the child's gaze is replaced by the adult's awareness, which invokes respect for the environment, and man's responsibility for the value of time ».
In summary, what does painting represent for Gaël Davrinche?
"This question allows me to say that all my painting goes hand in hand with a long journey of research and personal growth, the result of a long and complex process, which, before reaching complete and declared self-representation, passes through a phase in which the artist's features are not immediately recognizable, nor immediately proposed as his own. In my paintings they take a first form and my inner dramas and my psychological blocks, which thanks to pictorial expression, I am able to rework and dissolve also, but not only, in the completed form of self-representation. In this way, I try to give poetic form to the anguish that marks the life of every man and it is thanks to the affirmation in the field of painting that I find a way to give full and complete expression to my identity ».
