Quentin Gouevic: Mélodie Mortelle

Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present Mélodie Mortelle, the third solo exhibition by Quentin Gouevic at the gallery in Paris.

"Mélodie Mortelle presents a new body of work I made following Cendres et Soleil¹. After this exhibition - which itself came after an intense period of destruction - I continued my research, seeking to give my painting a different vibration.

I always work empirically; and since I never know what my paintings will become until they are finished, I sometimes feel as though they emerge like memories, reminiscences I can draw upon to organise my thoughts, my vision of the world, and the way I inhabit it. It is as though each painting becomes a chalice of sensations, a receptacle within which I try to find myself and to find a logic. More than ever, I am searching for a pictorial response to this quest for meaning that I experience in my life, and to the existential questions that have occupied me for a long time.

Over the past few months, I have grown much closer to my material itself, because I could feel this desire growing in me to "charge" my painting with memory. This search - rooted in memory, identity, and alchemy - fascinates me more and more, and represents, in my eyes, a pictorial concern that is both very concrete and deeply mysterious. How does one manage to "render" memory in painting? And what do paintings say about us? These questions exhilarate me and push me to expand my language, to open up my painting, and to explore many different paths through it.

For now, it is mainly through the stratigraphy of my paintings that I feel I am beginning to find answers to these questions. The act of building, erasing, digging into, covering with - superimposing pictorial spaces one upon another in a physical and cathartic dynamic - genuinely gives me the feeling that painting can become a tool for understanding the world. This importance - the need to infuse my painting with part of my own memory now holds for me - continually drives me to explore further and deepen my understanding of forms, traces, and colours. A Shape is a painting that feels very representative of all this - both in its form and in its mineral quality. It is a strange painting, one that attracts me when I look at it, and gives me the impression of standing before a mirror in which I recognise myself without actually seeing myself. This feeling surely comes in large part from the organic form that occupies the space of the painting with such presence.

Alongside all this, I continue a practice of destruction within my work, as I have done since before Cendres et Soleil. This gesture has now taken on a liberating dimension that allows me to take new risks, and it is within this context that I made Fast and Loose, a more explosive painting. It is a different kind of work, in which I try to activate the line and intensify the expressionistic dimension of my gestural language in this type of painting. Mélodie Mortelle brings together a body of work made in a close period of time, but born from multiple intentions and eclectic concerns. Since I began painting in oil, the protean dimension of my work has become increasingly pronounced, and I embrace it fully. Experimentation remains at the heart of my process, and this is something I deeply care about - because it is what I admire in the painters who have influenced me, such as Willem de Kooning, Albert Oehlen, Philip Guston, and more recently Gerhard Richter.