Diane Benoit du Rey's large, colourful abstractions are marvellous pieces of contemplation, skilfully playing the balancing act of shades of colour whose luminosity radiates from the oil paint, to the point of providing a physical experience of the pictorial material. Didn't one observer tell the artist that she felt like she was in a sauna looking at her paintings?
- Julie Chaizemartin
"Simultaneity in light is the harmony, the rhythm of colours that creates the Vision of Man".
Robert Delaunay, La Lumière
I see yellow, blue, pink, green. Liquid stains and flames with lascivious curves. They brush against and embrace each other, harmonious, as round and soft as the edge of a palm. And then I see the grey nestling between the green and the violet, the discreet brown nestling between the pink and the blue, the dark anthracite intruding into the fuchsia and light blue, I see the half-tones, troubling, evanescent, revealing themselves, elusive veils that nevertheless cling to my retina, persistent, like flashes of memory that flash back. Like streams of crimson water sailing through clear waves. I stay, I contemplate, I drink in the canvas with my gaze, even my body is swathed in its coloured vapour, which at the same time seems to tint the surrounding air. The colours, their velvety softness and brilliance, emerge from the painting's window and stretch out their moist, happy hands towards me. A feeling of mist, of losing one's bearings. The fluorescence of the pinks and greens hypnotises me. I now see a white halo, or perhaps a black hole. Cosmic beauty, a rip in the sky, the call of dawn. The phosphorescent green of the aurora borealis capsizes the horizon. The acidic shimmer of a cocktail reminds me of forgotten emotions. My eyes and my body contemplate. And after a long time, I may see the stars. The hole in the canvas is immense, as far as I can see. The colours embrace me as they lift me up, towards the unknown. The atmosphere, the clouds perhaps, or the microscopic iridescence of an opal? I find myself facing the infinitely large and the infinitely small at the same time. Space-time is distorted. The mystery of absolute abstraction. Diane Benoit du Rey's large, colourful abstractions are marvellous pieces of contemplation, skilfully playing the balancing act of shades of colour whose luminosity radiates from the oil paint, to the point of providing a physical experience of the pictorial material. Didn't one observer confide in the artist that she had the sensation of being in a sauna in front of his canvases? This is oil, meticulously applied, with passion and temperament, not dripping ink or spray. A sensitive and sophisticated technical gesture, oil painting requires mastery and taming. "It's very physical" confides the young artist, who spend hours working on these canvases to make the colour, the light and texture speak, layer after layer, in order to extract from the material all its capacity for movement and radiance, without the painter's gesture being discernible in the end. A successful gamble. At a time when figurative painting is taking over the picture rails, Diane Benoit du Rey's unfathomable abstract stars electrify our imagination. The artist creates marvellous chromatic marriages, reflecting on the delicate balance between acute saturation and tarnished mattness.
The talent here lies in the nuances, the transitions, the edges, the fragile contours, where the transition from one colour to another takes place. The result is great baths of colour reminiscent of Hans Hartung's immense galactic mists, themselves reminiscent of Rothko's suspended strips. Diane Benoit du Rey is a great admirer of these two artists. In her work, there is the same attention to the sensitivity of colour and matter, but with a more striking circular energy. Like neo-simultanism. Windows towards mysterious horizons - one thinks of James Turell - flashes across the canvas in the image of Dan Flavin's neon lights that dazzle the atmosphere, one of the artist's tutelary figures. "I'm interested in seeing the path taken by the eye and the tones", she says. While her large-format works are characterised by movements of luminous spectra that dance and merge, to the point of colour saturation, the smaller, darker and more enigmatic works respond to a vertical rhythm, breaking with the idea of landscape and coming closer to a chromatic frieze. Another, darker series is inspired by the idea of the appearance of inexplicable light prisms. Diane Benoit du Rey began painting figuratively before opting for abstraction. But intrigued by the sensuality of the backgrounds in her early works, she radically embarked on the minimalist adventure, giving it an intense dimension of vaporous epiphany, endowed with depth, and tending towards a third, even a fourth dimension.
- Julie Chaizemartin, journalist and art critic
20 may 2023
