Press Release - Dominique Figarella


Dominique Figarella employs materials such as plywood, Plexiglas, foam rubber, tennis balls, and chewing gum in his paintings. He makes the painting’s materiality and appearance his subject and thereby explores the power of the medium as the message. His fresh approach to painting and his ironic use of subversive materials is highly intriguing, while the conceptual basis of his work is rigorous.  In many works he makes a spontaneous gesture and then "engages" that gesture through displacement, alteration, masking and mimicry.  There is, in his work, a large gap between his initial act and the resulting work of art.  

Slip, 2001 is a formally beautiful painting that was created with the most unorthodox of material, a toilet plunger, a nod to the urinal of Marcel Duchamp. As in many of his works, Figarella masks his gesture by repainting and even inventing some of the splash marks.  He uses Plexiglas as a transparent and yet reflective front face, leading the viewer to question of what, and even where, the "painting" is.

Dominique Figarella was born in Corsica in 1966 and currently lives in Nice. He has exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States. While Figarella’s work can be associated with American artists with roots in the Post Minimalism of the 1970’s, it is closer to the French Support/Surface Group, of which Noel Dolla, his former teacher, is a prominent member, as well as to such German artists as Gunther Uecker and Blinky Palermo who in the mid 60’s and 70’s made painting’s form and structure their subject.
 
Renata  Poljak  in Memories, 1999 makes the video's main subject the father figure in the private and public, political sense. She writes and rewrites the words Tito, Tata, ("Daddy" in English) obsessively. The rhythmic repetition of sound and gesture in writing down the words Tito and Tata, transforms them into sound material for a popular song on which the artist is dancing.