Dan Brault — À propos — Slash Paris

Dan Brault’s painting is constructed by mixing signs, codes, styles and aesthetics, accumulating a host of graphic elements, sometimes abstract, sometimes from popular culture. The result is a dreamlike and expressive vision, at times raw and testifying to the artist’s enthusiasm and baroque sensibility. In this, the artist imposes an intuitive relationship to painting, the experience he offers being above all oriented towards pleasure and trouble. From this significant dissonance, the viewer experiences a euphoric loss of reference points and a questioning of the limits of the genre.

“My practice in painting is based on the confrontation between images of various aesthetic origins which draw from the codes, history and genres of the medium. This results in the production of paintings with various styles and techniques, ranging from hard-edge painting to comics, and borrowing from other more classical genres such as gestural abstraction or still life. Beyond the basic game of quotations and borrowings, I draw from a vast bank of historical motifs by mixing and excerpting, like a DJ.

As a result, my paintings echo each other as much as they clash, forming a kind of syntactic composition that overflows their own frame. The units, thus juxtaposed, continue this already present game of sampling and act as an intermediary for this pluralist aesthetic thought. Finally, the eclectic nature of my paintings and the way in which they are placed in space suggest a current consideration of the nature and history of painting and its relationship with our times. "(Artist’s words)