Sigê

Mepaintsme is pleased to present Sigê, a solo exhibition of paintings by Belgian artist, Frédéric Dumoulin. Taken from the ancient Greek language, Sigê or silence, beautifully articulates the artist's reticence to language when contemplating nature. For the artist, nature is simply a point of departure; the realm of unconscious experience from which images emerge. Sharing the hereditary traits of landscape, the works presented herein are two separate yet equally powerful bodies of work that inform one another while maintaining their own unique voice. Much like a river's flow, diverging at times and coalescing again, the viewer mediates between the two processes and experiences. 

In one course, loose brushwork reveals recognizable forms such as tree trunks, fruiting branches and mountainous silhouettes as points of reference, placing vast empty spaces into their respective contexts. Much in the way 8th century Chinese silk scrolls demonstrate a gentle balance of silhouetted mountains and trees against a backdrop of solid color, the artist allows for empty areas of muted hues between forms to communicate a sense of space and air. Employing the natural weave of the linen as integral to the strength of the compositions, Dumoulin allows the raw beauty of the material to satiate our desire for connectivity to real experience. Even so, it is what’s not there that becomes the central component to much of the drama in these works.

In his more abstract paintings, Frédéric Dumoulin penetrates the visible world and distills nature's essence by means of repeated wave patterns and geometric framing forms, conjuring the designs painted on terracotta vessels of ancient Greece’s geometric period. “This human expression, among the first in humanity, has a freshness, a poetry and a precision that I try as best I can to render in painting,” the artist states. “I try to build a domain...where everything finds its natural place.” In this approach, the artist also finds a use for the natural subdued weave of linen; the gentle grays of untouched surfaces delineate the space, forming connective tissue between recognizable, yet simple, flat, natural forms. The overall visual effect of the undulating rhythms and gently scumbled, colored surfaces feels as though they were excavated from a thousand years ago.

Frédéric Dumoulin’s concurrent streams of visual language tell two parts of the same story. They share the same oxygen as two of the artist’s favorite works of literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey, by Homer. “For a long time now, I have been carried by these two essential texts. They fascinate me and I’m constantly rereading them like a magic mantra.  Even more than the story, it is the way of telling, the words and expressions chosen that shake me and charm me.” This insight could describe why the paintings of Frédéric Dumoulin speak so beautifully to one another. These works consider nature as both subject and inspiration, yet it’s their divergence and the manner in which they’re understood that captivates us.