“On foot” is also the way the paintings gathered for this exhibition in gallery Anne Barrault space were made. The shapes on their surfaces were inscribed on foot. Whether they are drawings, footprints or colored stretches, they all emerge from an accumulation of traces left during performances while the paintings are still lying on the floor. During these sessions, sequences of endlessly repeated actions are performed in the paint. Whatever these movements or their circumstances, from a simple step to a more complete operating chain, they can be executed by anyone, without know-how, as long as you are endowed with a phenotype conforming to Homo sapiens standards. None of these movements is expressive, because none is intended to mean anything whatsoever. They are rather traces mapping the various motor skills from a purely functional point of view. This mapping is then inscribed in the last visible traces on the surface of the shapes by a pictorial process through which the movement is literalized in the form of vectored segments.

These lines outlined in the paint write the patterns of the actions, which cross the paintings and are engraved in their general movement, like a skeleton shown through the shape, or fossilized gestures in their environment.

The latter paintings are in the continuity of DF’s pictorial practice. In a debate, he declared: “I have never done anything else but going back to traces. For me, painting, inscribing shapes on a surface, is always done with going back, reusing traces previously left there, as well on the surface of the inscription as persistent in my memory in the shape of mnesical traces. Most of the time, it is a question of erasing them, masking them, of reusing them, of translating, hiding and guising them, in short: of recovering them.”

By following the track of the movements left in the traces, he transcribes simple functional gestures into a writing system, and thus tries to hold symbolism and locomotion together by mixing one into the other, without ever opposing them or taking them back to the well-known conceptual limits distinguishing nature and culture.

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