Giverny | Artist | Christophe DEMAREZ | Paintings

Christophe DEMAREZ

115 rue Claude Monet
27620 Giverny
Phone : 33 (0)6 09 83 33 00
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Christophe DEMAREZ.
Born in 1963 in Vernonnet at 2 kms from Giverny.
Paints some other world made of childhood gardens,
women in their intimacy, dancing streets,
past’s scenes. All moving in silence.

It is because it serves no purpose that the painting of Christophe Demarez is important.

What is enthralling about this painting is that you can’t go wrong : all you need to do is to accept it for what it is.
Let’s put to one side imitation. These paintings copy nothing, they create.

What is this creation ? This man is an artist because he paints. And if he paints, it is that he can see : lay-outs, arrangement of things and objects, attitudes, play of light, shadows, intense colours, contrasts, imperceptible details. sometimes a sketch, a preliminary drawing… In short, the piece is never painted from life.

Why is he able to see the inessential ? He is the individual of small perceptions. There is something of the sponge in this man, not the kind that wipes things clean, but the sort that absorbs and retains everything. Sponge is the other name of the memory. When it is entirely full, the artist goes up to his studio, settles himself, takes his time and then it all begins. The memory produces the images, his hand, his technique as well, materializes them on the canvas in an original arrangement, rarely final, but always daring. What comes out of the hand, the head, the body is compulsive, but it must not be released in a random fashion. That is where the work lies.The temptations of facility, the reassuring tricks are swept away, stifled.

In this privileged moment, the contact with the canvas drains what the memory gives. The argument, the battle with the canvas commences. It may take a long or a short time but it is always exhausting. The sign that it is finished – but never completed – is when the body and the memory have given their all, when the eyes have reached saturation point. The calm can then well up…Until the next canvas, until the next incitement.

The onlookers that we are, may now arrive.

P. Truchot (translation by : Rebecca Truisi)