DEVANT TOI COULE UN FLEUVE

ADRIEN COUVRAT

The exhibition Devant toi coule un fleuve[1] at Galerie Maubert opens with a very dark painting (Narcisse, 2024), whose subject is barely recognizable unless it is through a reflective surface. The evocation of Caravaggio's young "Narcissus" (1597-1599) gradually emerges. It is the image itself that attempts to grasp itself.

When looking at Adrien Couvrat's work, one has to go back and forth. His paintings allow the eye to wander in one direction, then the other. As we take a step to the side, it fades into a diaphanous, hazy white. The houses (Villa Madame, Villa Savoye, Villa « Le Lac » Le Corbusier), whose interiors have been chosen as subjects, are also sleeping beauties. Corbusé's villas, frozen in their museal solitude, give free rein to the polychromy of limewashed walls, covered with oiled wallpaper thanks to the development of "color keyboards" in 1923. In his series of acrylic canvases, Adrien Couvrat extends the architect's preoccupation to maitain his color ranges not in the decorative field, but "in the architectural fact, the mural fact"[2]. The painter doesn't proceed as restorers would, in search of the right tone; he composes and harmonizes a two-sided work that the nearby mirror reveals. In the Villa Madame series (2024) exhibited at Galerie Maubert, the pictorial surface combines two images, one of an empty space and another, more abstract, representing the materialization of an apparition of light.

His process, derived from a vibration of colored waves digitally deployed like random sheets of sound and vision, has been spreading across the canvas for the past ten years. Socrates' words from Paul Valéry's Eupalinos ou l'architecte resonate admirably; ''this vast irregular sheet of water, which rushes by without respite, rolls all colors towards nothingness''. And its successive apparitions have turned into microgrooves that catch light particles in the abstract canvases entitled Lyre. The work can be appreciated with an oblique, skimming gaze. "Where does the light come from, the background of the canvas or the veil?”

The previously striated texture prevents the pigment from spreading into the final coat of spray paint. This technique, playing with the surface's asperities, echoes Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's reflections on "the smooth and the striated" in Mille Plateaux, i.e. "smooth space is occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe, or ice. The creaking of ice and the song of the sands. Striated space, on the contrary, is canopied by the sky as measure and by the measurable visual qualities deriving from it."[3]

Adrien Couvrat, like others before him (Paul Klee), explores the haptic aspect of painting through its quality, its spectral materiality. Beyond the discoveries of optical art, his approach also follows the research carried out since the late 60s on color[4] and its application to architecture. Thus, the gradations on the facade of his Couleur tombée du ciel (2022)[5] is reminiscent of Albert Vanel's impressionist colour chart, which can also be formally related to Sherrie Levine's Melt Downs (1989-1991). This appropriationist artist geometrically transcribes her analysis of chromatic data from Impressionist masterpieces.

''Living in a painting''[6] could be the adage of this painting-environment that radiates from the screens and brick walls created by Adrien Couvrat. The artist also focuses on the rhythm and sense of movement within the image: the direction of the Assyrian warriors on the bas-reliefs in the Musée du Louvre, from left to right; the path of light over the course of an entire day in his 3D animation of Fra Angelico's Annunciation (2023-2024); or in the Poursuite series (2019-2024), subtle halos against a black background. Whether figurative or abstract, the composition of these paintings evokes the infinite delicacy of the skimming of the surface.

Alexandra Fau

Art critic and curator

[1] Sentence taken from Paul Valéry's Eupalinos ou l'architecte, 1921.

[2] Le Corbusier, Salubra, claviers de couleur, Salubra edition, Basel, 1931

[3] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux, Minuit editions, 1980 p.598

[4] Colloquium in March 2024 at the École des Arts Décoratifs on Yves Chanay and Albert Vanel's researches and at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky.

[5] Enameled brick wall, 5 x 12 m, Theop, Paris 15

[6] Excerpt from an interview with Adrien Couvrat recalling his visit to Villa « Le Lac » Le Corbusier, whose colors are said to have been modulated after Raphael's Triumph of Galatea.