Caroline Denervaud

About

In 1964, André Breton wrote about Alechinsky: " What I taste most in art is what you hold, this power of embracing curves, this rhythm obviously organic, this happy abandonment of woman that you get colors, light . " In 2019, we could lend these words to the vibrant work of Caroline Denervaud.

In the contemporary artistic context, which has made avant-gardes a new classicism, Caroline's paintings take us back to the Paris School after the war. Indeed, how can one not see in his work a reminiscence of the lyrical abstraction of Serge Poliakoff, or the conversations held by Maurice Estève with his paintings?

At home, as at home, no pre-established image, no shape desired a priori. Primacy is given to the infinite dialogue between gesture and color. At the time of the ephemeral and the pastiche, if one decided to judge the soul of a work of art to its incarnation, the sincerity of Caroline Denervaud would be no doubt: each of his gestures responds to an innate, absolute and imperious need, so that it is impossible for him to cheat.  

This is why, when we watch it paint, envy first takes us to talk about its movements, the involvement of the body in its process of creation. His tracks and self-filmed videos, already presented by Double V in early 2018, document dance performances - never choreographed - where the gestures of the artist sway from the intrinsic to the extrinsic, to finally give birth to drawings. an intense fervor on the surface of the paper.

In the new series presented today, the importance of color matches that of the gesture to open new pictorial horizons. Because, as Poliakoff aptly reminded us, " we must not forget that each form has two colors: one inside, the other outside ". The chromatic scale now gives the tone, carried to its climax by the artist prey to his imagination, abandoning references to the outside world to create his own universe and move towards pure abstraction. The result is a world in perpetual mutation, where the image springs from the palette.

Shapes and colors " that disturb us and move us as only all the poetic signs that allude to this deep world buried in us, as a second nature ". Charles Estienne, Denervaud greet you.

Emmanuelle Oddo