Germain Hamel — À propos — Slash Paris

Qualified from the Paris Fine Art School, Germain Hamel, 26 years old, is interest in painting as an object, the image and its depiction in the limited space of the canvas. According to him, it is in becoming a motif that an image enters the field of vision.

Like Frank Stella or the Support/Surface group before him, from as early as his first work, his ambition is to deconstruct the canvas in order to break with the idée of square that is traditionally incumbent upon the format of a stretcher. The canvas for him becomes an image and an object, and no longer a simple space for representation. With a certain formal modesty, he renews with the idea of “shaped canvases” but it is by the through way of the optical illusion that he manages to outsmart his initial problematic. The lower angle is then painted in a different manner and colour, immediately giving the impression of a folded canvas. Celebrating in his manner the theories of the Dutch painter, Daan van Golden, the writings of Josef Albers on the Interaction of Colours or even the work of Gerhard Richter and Steven Parrino, Germain Hamel also pursues in an even more personal manner an ideal of painting that would override the rules described by his forebears.

Text from the 58e Salon de Montrouge catalogue — by Romain Torri