I am often asked why my characters are big... Thinking about it, because first of all I paint on instinct, they are big with the emptiness of our lives, they are big with nothing, with having it instead of being it (I think of Souchon, Sentimental crowd) They took selfies, you want some, they photographed their dish at the restaurant and shared on the networks. They rushed to the sales time under the barely open gates of the store.. .and so on ....
A former musician and theater actor, Denis Blondel has been painting for over 30 years.
According to his own words, he paints his anger, his anger in front of a world that he cannot resign himself to accept, in an existential pessimistic movement which does not exclude flashes of gaiety, a way of exorcising the cruelty of a ruthless universe.
He paints his moods, his mood, his emotions of the moment, trying to restore them with a range of colors ranging from earthy black to the brightest of whites, alternating weight and flight, gravity and lightness... His gesture is vehement , resorting to scrapings, scratches, scars, savagely masonry impasto, in a posture that evokes the visceral expressionism of a Soutine mixed with Eugène Leroy.
His characters are naked, fragile, unsuitable, lost, patched up, distraught, dismembered and hastily sewn together, but their flesh, even reduced to dangling shreds, throbs and resists, screaming loudly their desire to face, to to survive, to resist...
Denis Blondel probes the bodies beyond their epidermis, searches them, tears off the skins and the masks to reveal their deep identity, their discomfort but also their immense capacity to protest, to refuse defeat, to want to recreate a universe commensurate with their aspirations.
Photo Adrien Blondel
