01 Mar 2012

Stephane Ducret | Doodles at GENEV'ArtSpace

After a ten year period of digital painting, Stéphane Ducret (Swiss, lives in Buenos Aires) -best known for 'sharp' and hardedge shapes- returns to the raw material of the paint, the canvas and colors in their maximum purity, reinforcing the question of how to paint, rather than what. His new work, 'Doodles', will fill the 4'000sqft of Genev'ArtSpace from March 9th to 21st, 2012 for his largest exhibition ever.

With 20 years of artistic exploration, Stéphane Ducret -who inaugurates his Doodles series in 2011- is keeping painting alive, unconscious, ornery and unafraid. Ducret's paintings call up a psychic territory of the brain and the absently scribbled marks when coupled with familiar tasks, being nervous or bored. At the source of his new process is also the intellectual projection that allows him to yield to the essential character of the child. 'In my art, I have tried not to use what I have learned until now, which is more complex than knowing nothing. I would like that my intuition speak of itself.'

What happens in our emotional world when altered by the unconscious? How is the unconscious affected by our consciousness? These are questions that Ducret asks himself in this new series, observing how a simple napkin, the margins of a newspaper or a piece of paper, transform themselves as the material witnesses of this mental and emotional process. Today, Ducret's paintings and drawings are witnesses of an introspective process, consciously evoking the feeling that continuously pushes him to the one of a child. That is why 'Emptiness' and 'liberty' are two key words in Ducret's work.

Ducret's work has followed a trajectory that is at once historically reflexive, very much of its own moment, and keenly self-critical. Ducret accepts that his paintings are subject to the intertextual meeting of various discourses. In his newer work, he conceives the experience of life and art as a whole. Moved by music, conventions and challenges of making art in the new Millennium, his work embodies and encourages its own contradictions.

Standing before such paintings for the first time is a curious experience because of the colorful doodles. His looping whirls of paint seem uncontrolled, but in fact they are highly organized, obtained with a carefully achieved randomness. Ducret's paintings are multiple, deliberate, absolute, and energetic. Ducret's interest in opening the paintings to a wide range of associations is further expanded in this work, not only by adding to his new investigation of the relationship between process and painted imagery, but also by raising the possibility of a painting that would invite an active, physical engagement with the viewer.

Ducret's discourse is tightly linked to the perception of modern and contemporary art by a broader public rather than only by art aficionados. It is boldly directed to the spectator, and yet it remains surprisingly open to interpretation. Through process, technique, scale, composition, and imagery, Ducret's work accentuates the tensions and contradictions between the act of painting, the construction of a picture, its physical attributes and the visual experience of looking at it.

The artworks on view in Geneva will all be produced in situ.

Born in 1970 in Lausanne, Switzerland, Ducret graduated in 1995 from the now renamed HEAD, Haute Ecole d'Art et de Design. He is constantly showing around the world and his work is part of numerous private and public collections, among other the BCV – Banque Cantonale Vaudoise -, the Geneva Fonds cantonal d'art and the Fonds des arts plastiques de Lausanne. He won the prestigious Leenaards Foundation award. He has lived in Pully/VD, Geneva, New York and O Porto, and he now lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.