Études pour coups fumants

 

This serie is the continuity of my research with shaped canvas. Their irregular shape has led me over time to structure more space with color, making the shape of the frame more operative than when I was painting on regular canvases. These atypical shapes with rounded corners directly influence my actions and encourage me to provoke unexpected movements. Certain gestures echo the irregular shape of the support while others generate a destabilizing dynamic. The interventions applied in a more mechanical way come to structure space and create a counterpoint to a freer gesture.

 

This exhibition puts forward an approach to my painting characterized by an economy of interventions that are intended to be radical. Amused by the expression coup fumant, I began to research its signification. Coming from the world of pool game, it indicates a blow so sharp that it causes a cloud of dust. This expression led me to reflect on the notion of skills, on the tactics of the players to place their marbles correctly on the game and thus succeed in the game with a minimum number of shots. I transposed some of these tactics in this recent work despite my painting strokes being aimless. So it is perhaps the momentum that we are talking about here, the movement by which I set out to take each gesture. To add to this desire to complete the painting with a minimum of interventions, I decided, as a first step for all the works in the exhibition, to leave the raw canvas partially perceptible.

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