Born 1953 in Paris, Dominique Gauthier lives and works in the south of France.
“Dominique Gauthier's painting can be conceived,
exist and be experienced only in terms of excess.
This specificity is consubstantial with his approach,
which is evident both in the simple scale of most of
his canvases and in the amplitude, luxuriance and
even the paroxysm of the work, this being deployed in
a contradictory movement, like the manifestation of
a random mastery that is bound to stir surprise. A
fascination that is perpetuated in the vertigo of the
gaze discovering a proliferation of forms, masses,
outlines, drips, thicknesses, superimpositions
and spirals in which colour becomes function, the
prime, immediate and necessary datum. Since 1976,
Gauthier's work has been overturning rules and
conventional discourses about abstraction, deconstruction
and the monochrome. Here, painting is
a form of wager, risk and adventure. The canvas becomes
the place of a visual and plastic experience, an
entity singularly linked to the complexity of a working
process that is constantly being renewed, constantly
evolving. An ensemble, a set of ensembles, instead of
the practice of series, which can often be anecdotal.
Sequences that echo each other, inducing side effects
(affects) from one painting to the next. Calling into
question conventions. For Dominique Gauthier, the
norm also consists in confronting the very limits of
the painting, in playing, not with quotations, but with
references drawn from the vivarium of a technical and
formal vocabulary like so many revisited, discernable
elements, to which can be added material borrowings,
fragments of painting, reappropriations.” (
Robert Bonaccorsi)
