Galleries in Paris

If an ultime proof of the inconsequence of artists’ « careers » was necessary, just remember that there has been no solo exhibition of Dominique Figarella’s paintings in Paris since 2000 (that was in Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery).

This absurd retirement is neither arrogant nor eloquent; simply, it is beyond understanding. Besides a hesitant look at painting, to my mind, this absence is the result of a series of misunderstandings, which this new exhibition may be the opportunity to reduce, if not clear up, thus allowing his artistic project to be considered in its very topicality, and in a complexity which is never specious.

For some years, Dominique Figarella has sometimes stuck on his paintings digigraphy prints of scenes, which seem to have been taken in the studio, inhabited by a human presence, never strictly appearing as the artist himself. These scenes always look Eden-like: sunlights, paintings carried like surfboards, crossed legs you guess with feet up…

Dominique Figarella obviously gives the looker-on the image of a “practice” which has nothing to do with “work”, but also that of an “object” which still remains an “adventure”. The anarchists of the end of the nineteenth century, Mallarmé and Fénéon circle, Incoherent Arts, Dada, Fluxus, situationists, are the members of the genealogy he indisputably proclaims, dominated by Kurt Schwitters and George Brecht. Dominique Figarella means to take his revenge on bourgeois, even aristocratic painting, to substitute it for craftsman painting.

To Dostoyevsky’s ambiguous motto, “beauty will save the world”, apparently, Albert Einstein echoed, “ craftsmanship might well save the world”. Between the two of them, Dominique Figarella has found room for a studio.
Stéphane Corréard