Giving paint some air.

 

To intellectuals observing contemporary painting with ceremonious gravity,
Patrick Chappert-Gaujal is a sunny, savory, and musical slap in the face :
each one of the astonishing bas-reliefs made by this young artist proclames
the desire for physical Culture. Veritable battle fields with the Visible, his works vibrate.
And smile ; Chappert-Gaujal works vigorously to put behind us the idea of sadness
as a condition of beauty. Chappert-Gaujal is giving painting some exercise.
His brilliant palette, justified by his regular visits to the contrasts of the sea,
illuminates curious labyrinths in relief, that seem to spring forth from a cream filled
pastry of a poetic pastry chef. And a network of graphical patterns trembles with
the dynamism of a mexican seismograph. Paying hommage to oxygen, the artist
has been composing for nearly twenty years baroque facets of a harlequin masterpiece.
"I go off on an adventure, on the beach or at the port, I make piles. And then I go get my car."
Wandering with wonderment, in the surrealist tradition, Chappert-Gaujal picks things up.
Driftwood, of course, but also floats, cardboard, sandals and all sorts of synthetic items
abandoned, worn, gnawed by the hot wind, the sun, the sea salt, the anger of the weather.
Dulled, cracked, wrinkled, the material itself is a design. "In my studio, I lay things out and
I arrange them, to have a fresh view. I walk around some more in the studio,
I pick something up, I place it on the canvas. It calls for another, then another,
with more and more specificity." Then a generous coat of white paint, so that the initial
structure softens even more. Enbalmed, the last splinters take on bud-like profiles,
looking like cotton swabs, matches. Small fires and mini caresses. Chappert-Gaujal
completes the sensuality of the fashioned volumes by decorating them, flat out,
punctuated by fresh materials, oil paint or polyurethane glue, swiftly set. Called by
the interplay of the forms, the color spreads out in broad contrasting areas, which offer
the view additional pathways, leaps and bounds, a veritable therapy of idleness.
The symbols, also painted, top off the decoration: dashes, stripes, guilloches, crosses;
a festival of signs: "I love to travel. That's why there are so many ants on my canvases.
And musical moments of rhythm." Chappert-Gaujal has always been in love with views
of architecture, biological views through a microscope, climbing, map making.
Created on the ground, his works give spectators wings and distance. "I am not a literary,
I am empirical. I am interested in practically the whole Byzantine Empire of African art.
His travel logic also works vertically: the pieces that Chappert-Gaujal recycles, animates,
sublimates, evoke fetishes. The slightest wooden branch looks even more like a primitive
spear than this his piled graphics seem like paintings of war or archaic stitching. And the
seeking of balance of his compositions, through piling and symetry, uses the principle behind
totems and the solemnity of masks. No black magic, however, even if the young man
has lived among the Dogons and, later, the Vikings. Like a golf course without holes,
the imagination of the spectator can wander about one of Chappert-Gaujal's canvases
with complete independance. The artist has succeeded in scratching through the surface
of the images without creating shaded areas, dark pits, hideous marks.

Francoise Monnin. 1993

in Muséart magazine. November 1993.