DANIEL DEZEUZE

Daniel Dezeuze’s ‘Mesoamerica’ is a personal reflection inspired by his travels in Mexico and Mayan architecture. In the mid-sixties, the young Dezeuze spent his first year in Mexico, which had a profound influence on him.

His latest ‘tableaux’, wall assemblages made from scraps of painted wood, recall this seminal experience of the jungle and vanished civilisations. On the ground floor of the exhibition, around a ‘negotiating table’, there is an installation of ‘weapons’, ‘table guns’ and other ‘shields’, evoking the tensions between nature and culture, ‘indigenous’ peoples and colonisers. The simplicity of the materials chosen – wood, wire mesh, corks – and the delicacy of their combination, offer a troubling reflection on the boundaries between art and craft, the savage and the polite, but also on the fragility of civilisations and modernity.

In the basement of the gallery, as a counterpoint, Daniel Dezeuze has assembled a collection of drawings, a jungle of flowers, insects, mosquitoes and snails. Bordering on abstraction, these drawings depict a delicate but untameable nature, reflecting the artist’s obsession with ‘capturing the elusive’.

For almost fifty years, Daniel Dezeuze has been pursuing his research into the deconstruction of the painting, exploring the traditional supports and materials of painting, in search of a reflection on the history and function of the practice of painting. Very early on he disregarded the canvas, turning stretchers against the wall, playing with emptiness and three-dimensionality to go beyond the limits of pictorial tradition. Curious about nomadic and non-European cultures, he imbues his work with craft practices and anthropology. His singular itinerary involves experimenting with materials considered poor – wood, gauze, nets, fabrics – and with misappropriated objects. His work has greatly influenced new generations of European painters, and is now part of public collections such as the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, the Carré d’art in Nîmes and the MAC, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Marseille.

Born in 1942 in Alès, Daniel Dezeuze lives and works in Sète. Since the 1970s, his work has been widely exhibited in France and abroad. The Musée de Grenoble devoted a retrospective to him in 2017, and the FRAC Occitanie in Montpellier held an exhibition of his drawings in 2015. His work has been exhibited at the MAMAC in Nice in 2012, the Centrale for Contemporary Art in Brussels in 2009, and the Musée Fabre in Montpellier in 2009. In 2008, he showed all his work at the Musée Paul Valéry in Sète. His work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions at the Collection Lambert in 2022, the FRAC Poitou-Charentes in 2020, the Musée de l’abbaye Sainte-Croix (MASC) and the MOCAD in Detroit, USA, in 2019, the Carré d’Art in Nîmes in 2017, the Abattoirs, Toulouse in 2015, and the Villa Datris, L’Isle sur la Sorgue, the Musée du Louvre-Lens and the Musée d’Art moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg in 2014, the Musée Picasso, Antibes and the Centre Pompidou – Metz in 2013, the MAMAC, Nice in 2012, the Centrale électrique, Brussels, Belgium in 2009 and the Sunol Foundation, Barcelona, Spain in 2007.

Daniel Dezeuze has been represented by Galerie Templon since 1999.

Press release courtesy Templon