Personal exhibition by Gaël Davrinche at the Galerie Vazieux in Paris from May 20 to June 19, 2021, organized by Olivier Kaeppelin, exhibition curator and author of the exhibition catalog Faire face edited by Éditions Lord Byron.
Gaël Davrinche's exhibition entitled "Faire face" is designed as a retrospective. It runs from 2005 to 2017, a period during which the artist devotes himself to the representation of the human figure exclusively through the painted portrait. A subject that he sees as a challenge at a time when this pictorial genre and its medium, the canvas, are being abandoned for new mediums. Over the course of the series, he will engage in a real exploration of the expressive potential of the human subject.
“Asking the question of the legitimacy of the painted portrait, at a time when the commission no longer exists, Davrinche has refined his thinking over the years, in particular with the series Under the skin or Kalashnikov. Fundamentally free, his gesture is sometimes incisive and nervous, sometimes perfectly meticulous. The audacity with which the artist alternates styles, moving from learned realism to the most spontaneous expressionism, illustrates all the attachment to painting as a medium with still inexhaustible possibilities, although critics have repeatedly announced the opposite. "
Fanny Giniès
“The painting in Gaël Davrinche's paintings is the expression of a journey, of a journey, the manifestation of one painting being to another, as in this painting entitled Fillette à la colombe, animated because that we can call, following Augustin Berque or Marc-Alain Ouaknin the “trajective”. The painter passes, without any hyphenation being detected, from Rembrandt to Marlène Dumas without forgetting Manet. It is not about an addition of forms but on the contrary of what links them to each other to "make a picture", that is to say a device designed to question us and face us. "
Olivier Kaeppelin