Solo show by Gaël Darras
From April 25th to June 14th 2025
Gaël Darras is an architect of drawing. He uses watercolors to construct mental images he has invented. Brick is omnipresent and allows him, at different scales, to repeat a modular principle that is both fragment and matrix. Under his brush, architectural spaces, walls, patterns, optical illusions are born… which can recall distant antiquity as much as they evoke our contemporary masonry.
A symbolism inherited from illuminators
To create these timeless images, the artist uses the tools common to both architects and painters (cavalier perspective, vanishing point, ruler, compass, set square) and is interested in different traditions and techniques of image composition. He draws some of his motifs 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 fresco painting, from Pompeian villas to the chapels of the Italian primitives.
The systematic use of iron oxide as a pigment (the very same pigment that gives the brick its red color) creates a monochrome and contemplative universe where each brick, each design vibrates with a particular density.
An immeasurable monument
For his new solo exhibition at Galerie Robet Dantec, the artist has broken his own codes to allow the invention of form to find its way onto paper. Against all expectations, lines become rounded, walls lose their rigidity. In his latest drawings, he allows the “mental thing” to venture into the soft, supple form, giving birth to new, almost organic spaces, which one might wonder whether they belong to a utopian construction or a living being. For the artist who calls himself an “image maker,” the question is moot.
What seems to prevail lies in the accumulation, the tight framing alternating with overviews, the images that are cut out and assembled into polyptychs. It is up to the viewer to find their own path and follow with their eyes the passages traced for our eyes by the artist.
From this path, one might believe it will lead us to the unattainable summit of an immeasurable monument, of which Gaël Darras only sketches fragments, and dream of embracing the world in a single glance.
Exhibition title taken from the book “La patience des traces” (The Patience of Traces) by Jeanne Benameur. Published by Actes Sud
