Dominique Figarella
Dominique Figarella, born 1966 in Chambéry, Frankreich, moved to Nice in 1987, in order to pursue his studies at the Villa Arson. In 1997, he settled down in the Montpellier area. Since 2001, he has been teaching at the ENSBA school of fine arts in Paris.
Dominique Figarella is committed to a rigorous approach to painting that blends skill with playfulness. His artwork from the early 90s features incongruous items, drawing on imagery, tools and metaphors for the painting-gesture. Balloons, band-aids and chewing gum make bedfellows with more traditional materials.
While setting up a complex interplay of intentionality and randomness, of gestures and imprints, these works remain deliberately abstract and strive to depict the very act of painting.
More recently, Dominique Figarella has been weaving photography into his artwork. The two-way mimetism between painting and photography probes the relationship that these mediums have with reality.
The painting, photographed in progress, embeds this same photo within its surface, applying and deforming it, and thus underscoring the construction process. This image conveys the actual making of the painting, like a snapshot of a specific stage or layering of the painted form.