Lines of force
Gaël Darras, Arthur Lambert
Biography
Gaël Darras (born in 1990) lives and works in Escamp (Lot). He is a graduate of the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Nantes Métropole (DNSEP) and trained in illumination with Master illuminator Jean-Luc Leguay who directs the International Center for Light Image Traditions (CITIL) in Paris. He is represented by the Robet Dantec Gallery in Belfort, which is devoting his first personal gallery exhibition to him in 2021. He is regularly invited for collective and personal exhibitions in contemporary art venues.
Arthur Lambert (born in 1979) lives and works in Landerneau (Finistère). He graduated from the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts d’Angers (DNSEP) with the congratulations of the jury. In 2015, he won the Special Jury Prize at the 60th Salon de Montrouge. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions and in particular at the Concrete Art Museum of Mouans Sartoux, at the Palais de Tokyo, or at the FRAC Pays de Loire (Edition of a catalog of his personal exhibition).
Concrete, this is the term that comes to mind to define the work of artists Gaël Darras and Arthur Lambert whose constructed works, based on lines, surfaces and colors, follow a geometric principle. But this constructed art is also intended to be the expression, through drawing and colour, of the foundations of worlds here reinvented in a pictorial universe rich in great aesthetics.
Thus, Arthur Lambert highlights transformed states of nature and being. In an incessant quest that summons thought and matter in turn, he invites everyone on a fantastic journey within his coded and secret language.
A painter who collaborated with the Scottish artist Richard Wright (Turner Prize 2009), he gradually turned his attention to watercolors and the disappearance/dissolution of the human figure. From painting, he retains a taste for color, the vibration of lines and shapes, involving more and more the abstract and optical dimension of his works. The use of paper allows him to affirm the materiality of the drawing by switching, from time to time, the different techniques and supports: gouache, gold leaf, painting on photography, Japanese paper.
Requiring a great concentration in the realization, his works call upon both ancient and current techniques in order to create a sensitive and structured architecture from the golden ratio.
Everyone is invited to decipher this formal musicality in order to experience the contours of these interior landscapes.
From the pattern of the brick, a tirelessly repeated unit, Gaël Darras constructs architectural spaces in a minimalist style with watercolors. His 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. These constructions cannot be inhabited, cannot penetrate each other: they are walls. They show as much as they hide, pushing the gaze to seek beyond. Their borders send us back to our intimacy, like “inner temples” whose entrance door is kept secret.
Gaël Darras makes his watercolors himself. The use of iron oxide as a pigment (the very one that gives the brick its red color) unfolds a monochrome and contemplative universe where each brick vibrates with a particular density. Gaël Darras uses tools common to 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 on the symbolic geometry inherited from the illuminators of the Middle Ages (golden proportions, dynamic rectangles, polygons, etc.) and on the history of the fresco, from the Pompeian villas to the chapels of the Italian primitives. As if driven 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 and fantastic monument.
