Painting

What Dominique Pagani says

Dominique Pagani takes up painting mainly in the 2019 cycle "Nature or Landscape?". There he has three paintings read side by side: Poussin's Arcadian Shepherds, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People and Friedrich's Two Men Contemplating the Moon1. They set the daytime, ordered nature of classicism, with the human figure at the centre, against the nocturnal, wild and uninhabited nature of Romanticism. The break of the French Revolution falls between the two. Drawing on Hegel's aesthetics, he holds that painting is abstract by essence, since it abstracts from depth. It stands at the edge of music in the gradual interiorisation of the arts2. He also traces how the figurative fades from Poussin to Rimbaud, and puts forward the hypothesis of an object that comes apart from Impressionism through to abstraction3. Earlier, working on Nerval, he links Watteau's Embarkation for Cythera, the ponds of the Oise and the Breton snow that Gauguin paints in Tahiti: there, landscape is a surface on which the subject projects its fantasies4. In 2023 he uses Goya's painting of time devouring its children to picture the contradiction within the subject5.

1. 1#5.4 Introduction / Nature ou Paysage ?25 Jan 2019
2. 2Racine4 Feb 2019
3. 3Chateaubriand26 Mar 2019
4. 4#4.4 Angélique (de Nerval)15 Jan 2018
5. 5"Je est un autre" ou l'identité contradictoire12 Dec 2023

Introduction produced automatically from the 5 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.