Guillaume Moschini — Djeziri-Bonn — Linard éditions Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 13 → September 6, 2014

Guillaume Moschini’s work is focussed on a gesture, a hue, always carried out in a liquid matter. In his paintings, he incessantly mingles inks with acrylic and methylated spirits. Interested in the limits of the colour field, he paints by combining rectangular shapes, which are not colourful tint areas but traces of a single brush stroke.

For a long time, the artist preferred using rather small-sized frames, making it easier for him to paint that trace, whose width is strictly determined by the width of the brush, in a vision quite close to Niele Toroni’s. By successive corrections of “accidental” drips, these shapes sometimes invaded the canvas to turn it into a quasi-monochrome. This practice, which was felt like an obsession, stood for a crucial stage in the artist’s recent apprehension of large- sized frames. Moreover, it had already characterized his first works, the ones painted with brooms on canvas sheets up to six metres long and mainly inspired by American abstract paintings. These resulted from an initial search for vast expanses of colour along with a desire to penetrate the canvas.

Guillaume Moschini, Untitled, 0 Acrylic on canvas — 81 × 54 cm Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Djeziri-Bonn — Linard éditions, Paris

In order to adapt his work to larger dimensions, Moschini started out by assembling two frames. From that moment on, he designed his paintings in terms of length and not of height, their various possibilities of arrangement creating new relations between colour, composition, and even scale.

Within his quasi-monochromes, shapes reappeared in the unpainted spaces of the canvas. An emergence accompanied by a conversion of Moschini’s paintings into drawings, which offers many a variations he played around with.

Having reached a certain degree of skill in the art of converting a trace into a shape, he could reproduce his technique on any kind of format and medium.

Guillaume Moschini pays great attention to the selection of the right tool and considers the choice of the method very carefully. On the one hand, the absolute clarity of his work requires the use of wider and wider industrial brushes so as to avoid repeated strokes of paintbrush. On the other hand, in order to be less litteral, the artist willingly breaks the continuity of the strokes by still using smaller brushes. Thus he draws and redraws the story of a shape by changing the way to produce it. The position of the trace is determined to the naked eye and not according to a specific design or drawing. It traverses the canvas, no matter where. The only rule to follow is to try to find a balance between the traces without them having necessarily the same dimensions.

Choosing large formats compelled Guillaume Moschini to lay his canvasses down on a table and work from the four sides of the frames, which required a real physical commitment. Paradoxically, for the very exacting professional he is, working on large-sized frames allows greater control than on smaller one. He just needs to stand on a little bench to apply the brush most delicately. If his approach is based on gesture, it refers to no expressionist gestuality.

Guillaume Moschini, Untitled, 0 Acrylic on canvas — 200 × 200 cm Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Djeziri-Bonn — Linard éditions, Paris

Furthermore, the artist protects the first trace from the various splutters. However, some of them are preserved insofar as they pertain to the stability of the painting. Then they function as a writing style, a wash tint, a “circumstance” which might be obsessively controlled and might even be the starting point of a painting. As regards the artist, he plays with the dichotomy between heaviness and weightlessness.

In this demanding approach, unconsciousness is at work : “my paintings are organic,” Moschini says.

Guillaume Moschini works in series. Each painting remains independent from the others and is not necessarily intended to be displayed within a predetermined set. Pieces can function in three, their association or separation depending on their relation to space and colour.

If Moschini’s work on shape is fundamental, it is a pretext to colour, which stands for a real project to him. The object, the motive of his approach is the communication between two colours and even the invention or the discovery of a new colour, including the one that is not perceptible at first glance, resulting from infinitely variable combinations… In order for two colours to match, there needs to be a fair balance between shapes, on the assumption that what is not painted is as important as what is. Afterwards, the logical harmony between sometimes clashing colours depends on the evolution of this or that series.

Fascinated by repetitive painting, Moschini develops a more and more distinctive taste for minimalism and radicalism. In order to show his longing to go straight to the point by being as light as possible, Moschini does not apply any primer coat to his canvasses. Instead he evenly applies a very transparent coat of diluted colour — a “jus” — , in direct continuation of Marc Devade’s experiments. If there are fewer and fewer hues, colour becomes brighter and brighter.

Moschini’s gesture conveys an emotion, a tension which only arises from playing on equilibrium and disequilibrium between shapes and colours, excluding any kind of systematic approach. If this work mostly deals with aesthetics, no aestheticism can be detected : indeed, Guillaume Moschini’s attention is not focussed on the beauty of colours, but on their unsteady balance, depending on the exposure conditions and the viewer who never stops capturing and recreating their values.