Artistic approach
Since the early 1990s, Marc Desgrandchamps has been exploring the landscape as a space of memory and perception, a place crossed and recaptured by paint. His works often originate in photographs taken during his travels: fragments of mountains, skylines, isolated trees, beaches and cliffs. These images never serve as models to reproduce but as memory aids, rallying points to recapture the luminous and emotional intensity of a bygone moment in time.
Over the course of the years, the artist has refined this relationship with places and their metamorphoses, observing the way in which a site reveals itself through its structural lines and how light constantly redistributes its forms. A mountain remains motionless yet its appearance is constantly changing under sun, rain and storm. This tension between fixity and instability is one of the essential driving forces of the artist’s work.
His discovery of the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire was a new step in this dialogue with reality. The artist was struck by the majesty of its tall trees, their trunks boasting an almost white lustre in the October light. Several recent paintings presented in the exhibition were directly inspired by these Chaumontais visions, extending an attentive rapport with the landscape’s living structure.
Bringing together a group of works ranging from the mid-1990s to the present day, the exhibition provides visitors with a journey through three decades of attention to open spaces.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
A major painter on the French art scene, Marc Desgrandchamps plays on the notions of opacity, transparency and superimposition. Although his paintings are figurative, their perspective is often altered and space undefined, and such anomalies as fragmented bodies and phantasmal objects occur in them. Drawing their references from numerous spheres (art history, photography, cinema, literature and music, as well as his own photographs), his works test the limits of figuration. A recurrent motif in his art, the female figure plays a central role in his body of work. There are a number of strong constants in his paintings, certain sites and the omnipresence of blue skies among them.
In 2023, his work formed the subject of a retrospective at Marseille’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and then at the Dijon Museum of Fine Arts, accompanied by a catalogue published by Éditions Skira. The artist was born in Sallanches in 1960 and lives and works in Lyon.
Marc Desgrandchamps is represented by the Lelong & Co Gallery, Paris.
