Paint a wall

From the pattern of brick, a unit that is tirelessly repeated, Gaël Darras uses watercolors to build architectural spaces in a minimalist style. Its buildings, devoid of any functionality, are devoid of spatial contextualization and precise time markers – they take us to a distant antiquity as much as they evoke our contemporary masonry. They float in the matrix whiteness of the paper, parts of which are left blank, like virtual volumes, mirages emerging from a blinding desert. These constructions do not inhabit, do not penetrate each other: they are walls. They show as much as they conceal, pushing the gaze to seek beyond. Their borders send us back to our privacy, like “inner temples” whose front door is kept secret.

The systematic use of iron oxide as a pigment (the very one that gives brick its red color) deploys a monochrome and contemplative universe where each brick vibrates with a particular density. Gaël uses tools common to both the architect and the painter (cavalier perspective, vanishing point, ruler, compass, square) and is interested in different traditions and techniques of image composition. He draws in particular from the symbolic geometry inherited from the illuminators of the Middle Ages (golden proportions, dynamic rectangles, polygons, etc.) and from the history of the fresco, from the Pompeian villas to the chapels of the Italian primitives.

At different scales of his work, a modular principle is reiterated which proceeds from the fragment and the matrix. The accumulation of bricks draws the shapes, the tight framing alternates with the overall views, the images are cut out and assembled in polyptychs. As if pushed by a continuous rewriting of the myth of Babel, Gaël Darras, in a constant repetition of gesture, motif and subject, seems to explore the contours of one and the same imaginary monument.