“This state of emergency is deeply worrying”
Marc Desgrandchamps exhibits new paintings in Berlin
What: Studio Julien Bouvier
Pandemic and isolation – time has left no one untouched. The French painter Marc Desgrandchamps has taken refuge on imaginary beaches and in his mother’s intimate memories.
KThe paintings seem awfully distant. It may be due to the blue sky hanging over the pictures. A winter sky over surreal beach landscapes. You can’t really get close to the figures in Marc Desgrandchamps’ new paintings either. They stand there faceless, translucent.
In a triptych – a footbridge, a tree, fluttering pieces of fabric, a wide plain roamed by elephants – it is irritating that the blue tones of the sky and the green tones of the landscape differ. On the right picture the colors are slightly darker.
It’s like looking at this part of the scene through a pane of glass. Or through the lenses of polarized sunglasses. Or through the visor, this plexiglass screen that some employees wear in the Corona test stations, whose visit unfortunately seems normal to us.
Desgrandchamps is exhibiting at the Eigen + Art gallery
The viewer’s imagination may run away with this, because these pictures painted last year must have been created under the impression of a pandemic and isolation. Time has probably passed no one without a trace.
“This state of emergency, which is setting itself up for us in the long term, is deeply worrying,” says Marc Desgrandchamps. However, he did not approach his painting any differently, his pictures have “always been motivated by a deep-seated feeling of uneasiness”.
Marc Desgrandchamps, “Paysage aux statues absentes”, 2021, oil paintings on canvas
What: Studio Julien Bouvier
The restlessness is not directly transmitted, one feels shielded behind this barely noticeable transparency filter and can only try to fathom what prompted the painter to create these pictures. Desgrandchamps has recently given his paintings titles. The triptych is called “Île de Wrangel”. Was the French painter living in Lyon really on Wrangel Island in the East Siberian Sea? Maybe in a dream when mammoths were still grazing there, the last of their kind that is said to have existed on the island up to 4000 years ago.
We have forgotten how to look a little
“These titles are not to be taken literally,” brings one of the artists back from the dream world. They are not the description of a situation, but rather the reflection of a mood. However, a title sometimes seems like “a letter addressed to the viewer”. Perhaps the painter uses this little trick of personal address to us, who in the past few years of the unusual exhibitions and the canceled art fairs have also forgotten how to look a little.
Marc Desgrandchamps, “Les Lettres”, 2021, oil on canvas
What: Studio Julien Bouvier
In the Berlin gallery Eigen + Art exhibits Marc Desgrandchamps oil paintings and gouaches. “Les Lettres” is the name of a canvas measuring two by one and a half meters, on which you can see the silhouette of a bust standing on a pedestal like a monument.
Desgrandchamps found – and was allowed to read – letters his mother had written to a man she knew before she met his father. He was not married because this man died very young.
From the letters he understood his mother’s grief and sadness, but when he painted the picture he also had to think of the ancient origins of the painting, the legend of the girl Dibutade from Corinth. She drew the silhouette of her fiancé on the wall when he had to go to war – to keep him as a keepsake.
This Greek myth still contains the core of what painting can do best. Laying down the traces and providing the impetus for possible images that only emerge in the imagination.
