Marc Grandeschamps

The work

Sans titre (Untitled)
2001
162 x 130 cm / 63.7 x 51.1 in.
Oil on canvas

This painting partially shows a section of a seemingly abandoned garden in a vague holiday setting. The human presence is only indicated by objects, the base of a closed parasol, and other pieces of furniture and garden elements that are difficult to make out. Light plays a leading role in the scene, intensifying the forms and strongly emphasizing the shadows. The brushstrokes are fluid and transparent.
It is a figurative painting made from an elevated, almost vertical viewpoint. Abstract pictorial elements appear on it that have nothing to do with the scene, for example, small drops like tears that descend carefully from points on the canvas, not overloaded with paint, elongated or square black spots that cannot be shadows. These formal anomalies, together with objects that are difficult to identify and an apparently careless composition, suggest the pictorial reproduction of an accidental photograph. There is no story or symbol other than the mystery of the scene.

The artist

(Sallanches, France, 1960)

Desgrandchamps is one of France’s most important living painters, the creator of an unmistakable style of his own that tests the limits of figuration. In an interview, he explained, “what often awakens my desire to paint is a visual stimulus, something I actually saw, whether it was a landscape or a building that intrigued me.” A painter of transparencies, evanescences and “liquid ghosts”, these adjectives are often found among art critics who recognise him as a painter with a particularly inventive and spectacular approach.
Desgrandchamps paints real but ethereal figures that reveal through themselves that minerals, trees, other people and objects continue to exist. His very fluid painting creates drips, like tears, which contribute to the impression of a world that is alive but seems on the verge of disappearing.
“His work does not fit into any movement or any of the usual categories. It can be called “figurative”, with the nuance that figuration is constantly destabilized and, in a sense, negated. If it depicts a world, it is a mental one.”