MINIMAL CHAOS

NICOLAS DELPRAT

The title of the exhibition proposed at Galerie Maubert by the painter Nicolas Delprat, « Minimal Chaos », evokes by an oxymoron effect the gathering of two distinct and opposite notions – minimalism and chaos – on the surface of the canvas. During his cross-border residency with the COOP association and the Centre d’art contemporain de Huarte in 2017, in the ruins of an abandoned village in Navarre, Nicolas Delpart left the strict limits of the painting frame to lean a pictorial minimalist installation at entrance of dilapidated houses opened with a hammer by passing residents. For this work in Situ, he creates phosphorescent paintings on steel tubes, proposing us, at night, a geometric and constructed decor of lights.

Nicolas Delprat creates paintings and installations, whose subject is to devote an in-depth reflection to the light value in painting, taking support on the heritage that runs through art history, from the invention of photography to Dan Flavin’s neon lights and James Turrell’s environments. Above all, he favours a logic of representation whose objective is to subject his light sources to a treatment both mnemonic and pictorial. Thus, his paintings often illustrate memories of lights: forgotten, remembered or imagined lights, but ultimately reinterpreted by the painting.