Franck Chalandard — Galerie Ceysson & Bénétière
At Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery, Franck Chalandard deploys a fantastic energy which, while initially striking for its dynamism, convinces through the multitude of side paths it leads painting down; paths whose radical nature pushes the practice beyond its own frame.
It explodes, it moves everywhere: from one canvas to the next, movements resonate without directly responding to one another, tracing a continuous pulse that the various objects emerging from the paintings do not hinder in any way, but rather extend.
A dynamic of excess and overflow governs the artist’s practice, which is in constant renewal. Contradiction, the impermanence of acquired forms, and the freedom of gesture are indeed prerequisites of the protocol for each of his series, leaving the visible field—beyond the fundamental reflection—to accident, or more precisely, to incidence. For each moment of the painting dictates the next, inferring a response from color and material (and even from erasure and its transfer onto another canvas, as is the case in one of the series presented here), allowing the work to continue writing itself elsewhere.
Thus, a line emerges insidiously as a horizon curve that seems to run through the entirety of the works presented, certainly fractured, and precisely reflecting this progression without evolution, this fertilizing distortion which, refusing hierarchy and the imposition of order, strives to give space to difference and to the repetition of the new.
Like a burst within this practice, each work is in motion, and the saturation of matter accompanies the crisis of the very status of the painting. Painting expresses itself and renders the painter’s gesture tangible, laying bare the different strata of its composition. This exposure strips it of any sense of dominance and abolishes secrecy, yet in no way diminishes its complexity.
Like an analog double, the sculpture made of painted wooden planks reenacts this composition through accumulation, gathering, through a movement akin to a snowball, the material necessary for its erection. As in composing on canvas, Franck Chalandard rolls and sustains a continuous movement of flow, from the dispersion of the tube to the spreading of matter itself, until reaching that unstable balance which nonetheless constitutes its unity.
