OPENING on wednesday june 04th 2014n from 5 p.m to 11 p.m during the evening Nocturne Rive Droite
«Recent Artworks»
The pictorial practice is initiatory. For Daniel Mohen, everything begins with a meeting, the one of a place, of a theme which he undertakes visual introspection until exhaustion. He flushes out the rich secrets by renewing his experience to the world which has been worth as a method for several decades …
The serial work on which the plastic issue of Daniel Mohen is based explains the multiplication of notes, sketches in situ, emotional statements that are so many plastic questions related to problems of construction, color and space. He deciphers a reality, what Hölderlin calls this “something knowable through the intermediary (medium) of its manifestation which the artist takes by the drawing, the smears and the spots”. It then becomes urgent to decipher the lines of the subject whose expressive simplicity allows us to identify its abstract identity which is universal.
The gesture carries the drawing that offers us the essence. Should we not speak rather of a gesture, whose immanent signifiance dispenses the sign and the signified, at once pure, schematic and dynamic? Prepared by the sketches, the painting keeps the momentum in the way the brush attack the support. It remains on the side of the outcrop. From quarry to quarry, from flint to pebbles, to poppies, the gesture stops, then breaks up and recomposes. So Daniel Mohen writes the history of nature. The slightest visual appeal triggers the form which in turn provokes the act of drawing, the necessity of taking the trace. The form tells its origins, its course, and it is clear that it is she who imposes herself on the painter whose gaze is fortified with fixity.
The simplest things pose with the same obviousness the question of representation. Through the affirmation of a free and autonomous line, the painting of Daniel Mohen reinvents a writing in the painted space of the canvas. The importance of drawing is part of the architecture of forms while the colors are as fragile as transparent, as opaque as they are bright. Between the reality and its transposition, the road traveled seals an indefectible relationship with nature. The painting is at the crossroads. She is a presence in the world.
Excerpts from the text of Lydia Harambourg, art critic, historian and writer, correspondent at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris
Published in the catalog of C.A.P. from Royan, Paris
