PHILIPPE DECRAUZAT
Brussels
22 April – 23 May 2015
Since the 2000s, Philippe Decrauzat has been applying himself to exploring the field of abstraction with an aim to pushing back the boundaries and multiplying different perspectives. His approach is grounded in his interest in a repertory of minimal geometrical shapes, which he observes in their various developments, before reclaiming them and making them his own. For his first solo show in Brussels, he is presenting three sets of shaped canvases that revisit those sinuous lines seen previously in his body of work, together with a new version of his film Anisotropy.
In parallel to his pictorial work, Philippe Decrauzat continues to add to his filmography, whose iconographic references underlie and enrich his entire output. The sculpture that is at the origin of his series of several short films entitled Anisotropy is carved from a block of aluminum. It is the enlargement of a scientific device that, by diverting the ripples that spread across the water’s surface, provides a means of speculating on the invisible nature of matter. In a visual oddity, the cinematic portrayal of its rotation resembles a vortex, whose interferences cause highly unusual visual distortions. By its form, it is reminiscent of the slits in the viewing cylinder of a zoetrope, that optical device which once set spinning produces an illusion of movement due to persistence of vision.
Initiating movement and stoppages, kinetics and immobilisation, it is the very same gestures and principles that animate Philippe Decrauzat’s paintings. Division, changes in scale and the other principles that are often used in the exhibitions orchestrated by the artist are applied here to a single motif in a new series of paintings entitled Flag Waves. The motif’s repetition in three different sizes allows the artist to establish a new relationship with the image that leaves the spectator feeling troubled as he realises that his relationship to the surrounding space has been perturbed. Without even having to move, the spectator is confronted with three different versions of the work of art and, unable to target the direction of their gaze, realises they are as if frozen to the spot. An original work of art or a copy, an initial drawing or a reproduction, the change of scale means that every possible instance of the image is present simultaneously.
