Fabien Boitard at Galerie Derouillon

Artist: Fabien Boitard

Exhibition title: Pensées magiques

Venue: Galerie Derouillon, Paris, France

Date: October 6 – November 10, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galerie Derouillon, Paris

Reinventing a perspective in painting, daring a radically new way of representing the world, such is the reason for painting for Fabien Boitard.

Truncated frames, distorted vanishing lines; there is a certain lack of tranquillity in the falsely bucolic scenes from this master of rhythmic inversions. “I’m aiming for something else, why not an emotional perspective,” he states. His backgrounds always take possession of the landscape, as if the gaze, prevented from circulating largo, was to collide with this Elsewhere that’s pulled in closer.

The eye is exposed, shaking the plane and questioning the painting. An uneasy feeling emanates from these robust «valleys.” You’ll find all the vibratory magic of a Joachin Sorolla, all the evocative power of a Gerhard Richter. But it is a contaminated nature, a «smoky» future that Fabien Boitard paints, a poet of ecological despair and an expert in harmonic tones and destroyer of pretenses.

Composing with intentions, says Fabien Boitard about what he calls the «Magical Thoughts», the title of his new exhibition at the Derouillon gallery in Paris, evoking fervor as a form of thought. Two years after «Waiting for Serious Things», still at the Benjamin Derouillon gallery, he has kept his promise. It is in the gravity and solemnity of an «andante» walk that one thus surveys his «landscape-envelopes».

Five moving tableaux released during the summer of 2018 from his studio nestled in Aniane, in the heart of the Hérault. The snow he paints is muted and his divining sticks vibrating, so that the unexpected arises. “Surprise is part of the spectacle,” the artist continues. Because everything is formal research for this line-layer, born of an industrial designer father and a mother acquired from the analysis of dreams. “Blurriness is a neurotic filter like any other”, the image scrambler explains. The colors are drowned with turpentine by a sfumato scholar.

The cadenced style is applied by knife, measured by the beat. Snow glowing. Between twinking and dazzling.

Les couleurs sont noyées par un savant sfumato à la térébenthine. Les touches cadencées sont apposées au couteau, elles battent la mesure. Luit la neige. Entre scintillement et éblouissement.

-Alexia Guggémos