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)