Dominique Figarella_2022 – galerie anne barrault

Dominique Figarella

The title od the exhibition is On foot, which, far from a bucolic invitation to a digestive walk, is to be understood here in its literal meaning, as our most elementary, archaic and technical means of moving. Our spaces, our perceptions and representations of the world are organized around this primary mobility. “On foot” is therefore a way of bringing these representations of the world back to the roots of their elaboration: the planted man.

“On foot” is also the way the paintings gathered for this exhibition in gallery Anne Barrault space were made. The shapes on their surfaces were inscribed on foot. Whether they are drawings, footprints or colored stretches, they all emerge from an accumulation of traces left during performances while the paintings are still lying on the floor. During these sessions, sequences of endlessly repeated actions are performed in the paint. Whatever these movements or their circumstances, from a simple step to a more complete operating chain, they can be executed by anyone, without know-how, as long as you are endowed with a phenotype conforming to Homo sapiens standards. None of these movements is expressive, because none is intended to mean anything whatsoever. They are rather traces mapping the various motor skills from a purely functional point of view. This mapping is then inscribed in the last visible traces on the surface of the shapes by a pictorial process through which the movement is literalized in the form of vectored segments.

These lines outlined in the paint write the patterns of the actions, which cross the paintings and are engraved in their general movement, like a skeleton shown through the shape, or fossilized gestures in their environment.

The latter paintings are in the continuity of DF’s pictorial practice. In a debate, he declared: “I have never done anything else but going back to traces. For me, painting, inscribing shapes on a surface, is always done with going back, reusing traces previously left there, as well on the surface of the inscription as persistent in my memory in the shape of mnesical traces. Most of the time, it is a question of erasing them, masking them, of reusing them, of translating, hiding and guising them, in short: of recovering them.”

By following the track of the movements left in the traces, he transcribes simple functional gestures into a writing system, and thus tries to hold symbolism and locomotion together by mixing one into the other, without ever opposing them or taking them back to the well-known conceptual limits distinguishing nature and culture.

exhibition view à pied by Dominique Figarella
(photograph by Aurélien Mole)