Philippe Decrauzat

If D’Arcy Thompson was convinced that the principle of recurrence links very different subjects, in his new exhibition, Philippe Decrauzat juxtaposes, in a series of paintings and a film, a veiled abstract composition and a close shot of the bottom of a coffee cup.
The composition of the new series of paintings in three horizontal registers in turn is similar to the cinematic frame, or to a painting by Blinky Palermo. Far from the rhetorical argument from authority, however, Decrauzat’s reference to the “master of porosity” is a natural one, as Decrauzat has, for many years, explored the expansion of painting beyond the limits of the canvas, and the transitory and unstable limits of perception, on his own terms. At the beginning
of Decrauzat’s oeuvre is a painting, vertical, narrow, with parallel bands imperilled by a central luminosity. The artist initiated his work under the seal of centrifugal and centripetal opposition, or in other words, the relationship of the painting to its presentation space. In the new series of paintings by Philippe Decrauzat, the veiled effect evokes a shadow, a movement that would run
on the surface of the canvas and which, beyond the intervals between them, would link all the paintings together like a reel of film.
In the second part of the exhibition, the film, 20 figures, is constituted of closely framed shots of a cup of black coffee. The subject treated in these successive motifs constitutes a narrative of Bohemian, Parisian idleness. The film also links the microscopic, in the form of the bottom of a cup, to the macroscopic, in the vista of the celestial vault that appears on the surface, a continuum that D’Arcy Thompson established between the biological and the mechanical, mathematics and physics, in On Growth and Form (1917–1942). It is stunning to think that
D’Arcy Thompson drove Richard Hamilton to elaborate another continuum, this time one of Pop, conceiving of scientific phenomena in their technical and mediated reproducibility. From painting to film, Philippe Decrauzat manages to invent a singular vocabulary as much as Thompson’s “forms already taken”, simultaneously embracing a phenomenon, its reproduction and its
commentary.