Gaël Davrinche, Figures de style

Gaël Davrinche. Figures de style, Paris, Éditions Lord Byron, 2022

1st edition
Edition of 350 copies
Hardcover, 21 x 29,7 cm, 240 pages
French English edition
Translated in English by Antoine de Mautor
ISBN : 978-2-491901-34-9

Gaël Davrinche. Figures de style is the catalog published on the occasion of the artist's solo exhibition from June 18 to September 18, 2022 at the Château de Carrouges (Centre des monuments nationaux) as part of "Un été ornais contemporain" organized by the Fonds départemental d'art contemporain de l'Orne under the direction of Pierrick Bigot. It includes prefaces by Christophe de Balorre and Philippe Bélaval, as well as an interview with the artist by Amélie Adamo.

Gaël Davrinche is a French painter born in 1971. He lives and works in Montreuil. He graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2000 and has been a professor of drawing and painting at the Ateliers de Sèvres since 2007. His prolific work, which takes the form of paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints, mainly reinvests the classical genres of portraiture and still life in a plastic dialogue between tradition and its complete deconstruction.
The artist never stops digging, searching, and drawing from the heart of the History of Art in the works of his illustrious peers what he considers to be the very essence of painting. Frequently borrowing from the graphic register of childhood, he quotes and caricatures with humor the masterpieces of European art in a series called "Les Revisités". Asking the question of the legitimacy of the painted portrait, at a time when commissions no longer exist, Davrinche has refined his thinking over the years, notably with the series "Under the Skin" or "Kalashnikov". Fundamentally free, his gesture is sometimes incisive and nervous, sometimes perfectly meticulous. The boldness with which the artist alternates styles, passing from learned realism to the most spontaneous expressionism, illustrates his attachment to painting as a medium with inexhaustible possibilities, even though critics have often announced the contrary.
Perfectly complementary, the "Memento Mori" bring a dreamy breath to Gaël Davrinche's work. In this series of drawings and paintings representing faded flowers, the artist approaches through the prism of allegory the timeless theme of the cycle of life and finally draws a portrait of man facing his own existential anxiety. An intimate, universal feeling that he explores with great poetry (Fanny Giniès)

Amélie Adamo is an author, art critic and exhibition curator. Her thesis in History of Contemporary Art was the subject of the publication of Une Histoire de la peinture des années 1980 en France (Éditions Klincksieck) in 2010. In 2011, she published Métamorphoses du sacré : sur Vladimir Velickovic (Éditions Galilée). She is also a regular contributor to numerous exhibition catalogs and texts for specialized journals such as Le Journal des Arts, Verso Arts et Lettres, Art Absolument, Artension, and the magazine L'Œil, of which she is a permanent contributor. Attached to defending the work of emerging artists but also looking at the work of renowned artists, she orchestrates exhibitions, in galleries or in museum institutions, whose interest is essentially in figurative painting, questioning the issues of memory and transmission, of crossbreeding and hybridization. In parallel to her activity as an art critic, she has also taught History of Contemporary Art at the university and in art schools.