DANIEL DEZEUZE

Daniel Dezeuze returns to Galerie Templon this season with a series of hybrid works lying at the intersection of painting and sculpture. Imbued with a more radical outlook than ever, Écrans/Tableaux: Variations continues to question the role, history and practice of painting and sets the stage for a new exploration, marked by the triumph of digital and proliferation of screens.

The dichotomy between screens and paintings has fascinated Dezeuze since the 1960s. When he was teaching at the University of Toronto, Dezeuze discovered the work of celebrated theorist Marshall McLuhan, a pioneer in research on new mass media and the growing incursion of screens. Daniel Dezeuze recognised in MacLuhan’s ideas his own intuition that technology was in the process of revolutionising painting. A founding member of the Supports/Surfaces avant-garde group, he worked on the deconstruction of traditional painting codes by removing the stretcher from the canvas, which he turned against the wall to play with the notions of full and empty.

With Écrans/Tableaux: Variations, Dezeuze takes us into a universe of supports that are repurposed and taken in new directions with a particular focus on the third dimension. These assemblages become enigmatic calligraphies and paintings. For Daniel Dezeuze, the discreet omnipresence of the screen in his work refers not only to the symptoms of a dematerialised, elusive society, dancing to the tune of the moving image, algorithms, artificial light and colour. His work goes further and provides a glimpse of an art capable of pushing back its own codes and reinventing itself: ‘my journey lies within the historical space of the painting, which is both a real object and an object of knowledge. For me, the love of painting involves a restrained sensuality, revitalised formalism and an artistic attempt that is open in its variations.’

Born in 1942 in Alès, Daniel Dezeuze lives and works in the southern French port town of Sète. His work has been widely exhibited since the 1970s in France and internationally. In 2008, he exhibited the entire span of his work at the Musée Paul Valéry in Sète. More recently, the FRAC Languedoc Roussillon in Montpellier held a major exhibition of his drawings in 2015. His work has also been exhibited in the Cherry and Martin Gallery in Los Angeles and New York’s Canada Gallery (2014), MAMAC in Nice (2012), Centrale Electrique in Brussels (2009) and Musée Fabre in Montpellier (2009). In 2017, he took part in the group exhibitions Supports/Surfaces, The Origins at the museum Carré d’art in Nîmes and The Surface of the East Coast, From Nice to New York at Le 109 art centre in Nice. The Musée de Grenoble organised a major retrospective of his art in 2018.

His oeuvre is now influencing an entire new generation of American painters and receiving renewed critical attention from across the Atlantic.