Ceysson & Bénétière

 David Wolle’s painting borrows from simple depiction without ever referring directly to reality. Two methods enable the artist to personify his imaginary motifs, to give them the same presence as an object, a figure, a portrait. On one hand, Wolle establishes and detaches them on a panoramic background like a series of transfers: the motifs float adrift in uncertain atmospheres or landscapes. On the other hand, he elaborates them upstream of the picture itself, previously with small models made of clay but now using a computer, adding and altering images. Something endures of these playful practices in the brushwork on the canvas: the tangibility of the modelling, the lifting and cutting of the digital collage.

Wolle transposes the status of these invented motifs to the canvas, together with their surfaces and their ambiguous matters: between architecture and living organisms, a pastry and rococo crockery, his strange and shifting forms seem to be made of very paint itself. The fluidity of the latter, its ductility and its pastel but unstable colours, embody the subject and drive it to the point of monstrous and deliquescent deformity. For if the virtuosity of this technique of oil painting serves to establish a statement of the act of painting as depiction, it is in order to able to explore better the frontiers of verisimilitude and bring the subject to the limit of its own demise. Wolle’s pictures depict what does not yet exist: it is the very process of the invention of the living that mimesis implements on the canvas.


Anne Giffon-Selle  

Ceysson & Bénétière