Galerie Nathalie Obadia is pleased to present Cendres et Soleil, the second solo exhibition in Paris by Quentin Gouevic. Born in 1996 in Saint-Brieuc and having graduated from the Beaux-Arts in Nantes, the artist has for several years pursued an abstract painting practice defined by total physical commitment. This physical engagement with matter reaches new heights in a set of four new, unseen paintings, marked by the transition from acrylic to oil. Reliefs, contrasts, the power of gesture, and a vibrant chromatic palette intertwine here, at the crossroads between the legacy of Abstract Expressionism and the assertion of a singular pictorial language. Cendres et Soleil is a testament to this, revealing a painting at once visceral and luminous. Quentin Gouevic states:
After my first exhibition at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, I sought to renew the way I approach my questions of painting. Cendres et Soleil presents a selection of four canvases that bear witness to my most recent formal, pictorial, and gestural advances. For several months now, De Kooning and Soutine have been at the heart of my concerns. As time goes by, I feel an ever-stronger need to physically enter into the materiality of my painting-almost to collide with it-despite the care I always devote to my works. After the experiments I have undertaken with transparencies, I wished to give more body to my painting, to renew my language of gestures, my repertoire of forms, traces, and colors.
Through this struggle, I managed to enhance its 'mineral' character: reliefs, exudations, craters-emphasized by drippings projected in the hope of accentuating them. My work now contains greater nervous energy and entanglement of drawing elements, particularly in the paintings Détruire and Facelift. My gestures have grown bolder, more explosive, accompanied by new kinds of projections on the canvases. Finally, layered upon all these different painterly energies, I have applied washes of Van Dyck Brown, Dioxazine Violet, and Reseda Green with meticulous care, creating contrasts of temporality and speed within my painting.
Immortels and Facelift are two paintings of strong chromatic intensity, while Détruire marks my first white painting. This work, in particular, was highly experimental, undergoing various treatments before arriving at its final form. In the course of its making, I tried different approaches such as scraping with a knife, dripping, and even collage experiments with paint rags. Détruire no longer shows these traces, yet all these experimentations gave it thickness and wore it out-in its intention, its forms, and its chromatic nature.
Like the others, it is a painting I am proud to present in Cendres et Soleil, for all the exercises in thought it demanded of me. This exhibition is a representation of my mental space, and the paintings it brings together recount something of my sensation of existence, my memorial and sensory heritage, and the era in which I feel I stand. In this context, I chose the title of the exhibition in reference and homage to the music of Gilles Bertin, singer of Camera Silens.
On Get What You Deserve, I spontaneously wrote "I Hate People" while listening to the eponymous song by GG Allin. It was not emotionally charged at the time, but afterwards, I liked the inscription and decided to keep it. These are more gestures of painting than actual claims or declarations. Immortels takes its name from a song by Alain Bashung, while Facelift is titled after the first album by Alice in Chains.
Cendres et Soleil is the fruit of a very intense year of painterly research, during which I destroyed a lot, and moved forward. On the occasion of this new exhibition, I would like to thank my mother Brigitte Gouevic, my friends in general, and in particular Romain Bernini for all the support he has given me since my arrival in Paris.
Quentin Gouevic
