Franck DUMINIL

In shared passion and pleasure, abstraction, among other things, seeks to be authentic and free; a synthesis of the work of our predecessors, and in the freedom to draw from traces, archaeological signs, and other sources, in the evolution of a controlled gestural approach, it is, in this sense, contemporary.

Avant-garde to some, reactionary to others, we are elsewhere, perhaps awakeners, certainly resisters.

By Franck DUMINIL
Paris, October 1999 (translated from French)

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FRANCK DUMINIL

What kind of abstraction, and for what purpose? Franck Duminil’s abstraction is rooted beyond the limits of time and space, in the pristine field offered by the canvas. His painting inscribes there the signs of a transposed reality that cannot help but lead us to reconsider our approach to the real. The entire history of abstraction is made up of these back-and-forths of meaning, these questions about forms or non-forms and the relationships they maintain with contemporary life. The question of choosing to represent the world or to resort to the informal arises each time the creative breath animates an artist. A sectarian divide between the two poles has too often sown confusion and led to a sclerotic determinism, detrimental to what, fundamentally, is defined as the expression of a form of life.

Duminil’s painting first strikes us with the sheer joy of painting. Painting for painting’s sake, first and foremost. This is what his canvases tell us, establishing an immediate and impetuous connection. They call upon our attentive and empathetic gaze, demanding a shared experience of this ordeal, forged from the pleasure and continuous labor undertaken in the studio. It is because our perception of reality is opaque, influenced as much by our conscious mind as by our unconscious, that abstraction continues to explore new artistic territories. We must not overlook the feverish movement, the irresistible force that triggers these interventions, which is none other than emotion. Driven by an inspiration springing from the depths of his being, the gesture transfigures into pure poetry the constituent elements of painting, the organic laws that govern its creation: sign and matter, color and space.

Duminil’s abstraction is a transposition of reality through which he reveals his feelings. What strikes the viewer at first glance is the plastic effectiveness that transcends discourse. One senses that while the intensity of the figurative evocation resonates with lived experience, its value lies solely in the intensity of the gaze directed at the canvas. We can surmise that Duminil is inspired by nature, by cosmic landscapes traversed by natural elements in which we believe we recognize primordial sedimentations, stars and lightning, storms and islets, but his formless dazzling forms, like his colorful gaps, are equally an expression of his pictorial language, the very power that painting alone possesses and reveals. One only has to look at some of the great masters of the past, to extract a few fragments from the masterpieces of Titian and Rembrandt, of Goya or Courbet, and also of Turner and Monet to highlight the vigor of color and the relevance of the sign, as an integral part of the process by which the artist achieves the palpable vertigo of beauty. With the plastic issues conveyed by abstraction which has swept away the canons of beauty, the criteria of beauty have been diverted, have shifted by privileging the vital impulse pointed out by Bergson and intuition.

Here, the surface of the canvas reflects the depths of the self, inviting an inner journey. Resorting to the informal does not mean “formless” but rather “non-formal,” as Michel Tapié clarified. Duminil understands this. His creative process is grounded in the crystallization of syntactic links, which he gleans from nature to reveal its profound harmony. For him, the emergence of signs constructs the pictorial space. As for the material, it is the matrix, the one that lends a magnetic consistency to the lyrical vibrations that traverse the surface. The brushstrokes are never random, but proceed simultaneously from his spontaneity and reflection, between the urgency of translating immediate sensation and its transcription. All calculation proves futile, even though the original nature of signs possesses an innate ordering vocation. He goes straight to the heart of the matter. With vigilance and enthusiasm, he develops his vision in deep accord with his awareness of the world and of man.

This fertile and vibrant vitality that animates his paintings has now entered a phase of plenitude, regenerating his pictorial language. A particular effusion is perceived not only as dynamic, but as the consequence of chromatic values ​​reaching saturation. The colorist summons light as a tangible reality. It makes visible what cannot be visualized. When, on the chalky field of the canvas traversed by flashes of light and cosmic signs, matter claims a territory, it pours forth small colored corpuscles identical to an atomic element, whose pulsating charge reactivates the pictorial space, which then participates in the creation of a universe. The pictorial matter aspires to a physical reality that only it can give. Fragments of space weave a cartography that proceeds by explosions. Only energy can allow the confrontation with flatness, only it still has the ability to invent the language adapted to its fervor, to find its equivalences and tensions by translating them into faults, scars, crevasses often unpredictable, but never fortuitous.

One after another, the canvases help us to transcend all boundaries, beginning with those of a naturalistic and mimetic vision. Duminil transgresses all formal organization. The paths are multiple and the journeys constantly reinvented. From diaphanous lines to bold arabesques, from blurred perimeters to sharp breaks, from rhythmic patterns to calligraphic lines, spread across a background that automatically opens the canvas, our gaze is captivated by these propositions that renew matter, sign, and color, transposed into autonomous elements of another reality—the reality of painting that has broken with the pragmatism of everyday life.

The canvas comes alive with the unfolding of the pictorial creation. In this crater destined for chromatic explosions, for material appearances, for bursts of color, the primordial white radiates and invites the most refined interpretations. It is this white, sometimes tinged with gray, with chiaroscuro, that absorbs spatiality, expands it, and reactivates it, giving the field of pictorial investigation its physical presence. The recent paintings bring us closer to this feeling of intimacy cultivated with matter-light. A particular breath runs through the painting, which has become the revelation of an event. Here, condensations of vibrant colors emerge from an ever-rich palette; elsewhere, great waves establish islands, moments of respite, before twisted incisions surge forth. In an insolent freedom, the radiant blossoming of signs is in unison with her questions, her enthusiasms but also her doubts, while the vital impulses are sumptuously visualized.

At this stage, vehemence, for Duminil, takes on meaning. It disseminates and reconstructs. Space opens infinitely as the graphic germination creates a new semantic dimension. The turbulence that characterized his previous canvases becomes more fluid, even if certain fragments still assert a gravity and tension within the density of the pictorial relationships. In full command of his abilities, Duminil allows a lyricism to flourish that he has no reason to restrain. He sublimates his emotion. The formal, colorful, and spatial inflections that we observe today represent full access to a poetic language that has become his own. The colors participate in this metamorphosis, which fully affirms the constitution of an autonomous style. They assert their heterogeneity, their chromatic diversity, in an outpouring that is sometimes dominant, of red, blue, and yellow.

Franck Duminil is more than ever a man of his time. If his move towards abstraction corresponds to an inner calling, the secret lyricism that dwells within him finds expression in a pictorial language whose intense vitality flows beneath the surface, reviving the currents that only painting can reveal. Duminil’s work allows us to experience this.

By Lydia Harambourg
Art Historian and Critic
March 2002 (translated from French)

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MIRRORS OF THE WINDS

A painter of “liberated abstraction,” which he embraces in all its complexity and whose interpretations are not solely defined by impasto, Franck Duminil ignores the whims of fashion to find his place in the development of non-figurative painting, thus becoming one of its contemporaries. “From prehistory onward,” the artist says, “the essential message in art is already contained in its entirety. But it is given to us to see, to bring to life, by nourishing it with elements specific to our time, and thus to transmit it. For me, art, although evolving, escapes in its essence all contemporary notions of progress, all phenomena of fashion, dogma…”;

“Imprints,” “Dawn of the Sands,” “Traces of Time,” “Parallel of Mists”—for the artist, abstraction could be both a reflected state of reality and a paradoxical figuration, which he experiences not as a rupture with the concrete but as a chromatic deepening of its substance. An imprint on the sand, a mist, the wind, a trace, the birth or death of a day—all the themes of the paintings exist in life, perhaps more blurred than the defined structure of objects, broader, more elusive to norms, yet they are part of those foundations of reality that the artist extracts and liberates onto the canvas.

The approach is delicate, while the technique, through the use of color, reveals its concern with expanding form by clarifying its condition of existence. From raw black and washed-out blue, from white devoured by gray, filaments of yellow, claws of white, poems in gold leaf, and anecdotes of red, Franck Duminil’s painting remains, above all, a grand adventure in the universe of color. The motif is never recognizable in the masses of hues that advance and recede, and while the abstract flesh tones of the canvases embellish the visible, the essential element here is not ambiguity but that mystery by which one paints the wind or the dawn, the mist or the wrinkles of time.

By Radu Vasile, 2003 (translated from French)

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FRANCK DUMINIL

Franck Duminil belongs to that category of independent artists who, without denying their roots, have forged their own unique paths. Considering his entire career, his work can be immediately situated on the periphery of lyrical, if not gestural, abstraction, but with its own intrinsic characteristics. He is therefore part of that group of artists who have built their approach on the non-referential organization of signs and forms.

Observing his development, his generation, and the artistic environment of his early years, at the crossroads of the layers that shaped so-called lyrical abstraction, his influences, the culmination of his reflections, and above all, his personal inclination, Franck Duminil could only enrich the field of investigation of this purely intuitive painting, whose potential he tirelessly explores by continually modifying his approach.

As we have seen, by its very essence and the nature of its components, his painting does not represent. Resistant to any resemblance, it implies an inner vision, even if it aspires to be cosmogonic, insofar as the inner world is inseparable from the other. But whatever its formulation, always close to a fortified energy, governed by the spontaneity of the servant’s hand, this approach does not initially stem from a predetermined subject or theme. It participates in a strictly emotional commitment, based on maximum freedom of improvisation, stirred by a series of gestural prompts, from which all premeditation is excluded. Moreover, the transcription of inner states, in an art primarily based on the direct expression of felt emotion, presupposes no screen, no intermediary, between the urgency of the recorded sensation and its pictorial materialization. Therefore, this capturing of the essential should be seen as nothing more than the emotional mediation of the tool and the arm that weave its vital impetus. This does not mean that the effervescence of forms delivered in their crystallization phase engenders any disorder or approximation attributable to their hasty outpouring. While all calculation is rejected, an internal order, a studied vigilance, as much bound to instinct as to the sum of accumulated reflective experience, presides over the perpetual birthing of the painting’s units.

By Gérard XURIGUERA
Excerpts from « Franck DUMINIL, un lyrisme retenu », Editions Garnier Nocera , 1994 (translated from French)