NEW YORK, NY.- Dunoyer emerged in the Paris art scene of the late seventies when his work was included in a trio of group shows collectively titled Ja na pa (with painters Christian Bonnefoi and Antonio Semeraro, and sculptors Tony Cragg, Côme Mosta-Heirt and Jean Luc Vilmouth). For Bonnefoi and Dunoyer, Ja na pa was a response to what they perceived as the misinterpretation of Abstract Expressionism by Minimalism. The concept of tableau was seen as central to analyzing that misreading, even as both painters offered different definitions of it in their multiple texts and conferences.
After the nineteen seventies, Dunoyer’s work is characterized by an emphasis on large vertical formats, with a monochrome ground and thick brushstrokes seemingly applied at random. The formal evolutions -so to speak- in his work are few and far between. In the early eighties the original blocks of heavily impasto strokes, such as those in “Eleonora -1979”, over which still floated the mark-making and mapping spirit of Martin Barré, made room for more detached, scattered gestural strokes, keeping their exaggerated impasto characteristics, such as in “Rouge - 1985”.
His exhibitions, in France and abroad, have been rare events, each one the occasion for philosophical clarifications on his understanding of the concept of “tableau” and of the nature of painting. His work is largely unknown in New York, even if it has been regularly shown by the Nohra Haime Gallery since 1984.
In the late eighties these scattered gestures became codified in a vocabulary of more elegant commas and other similar types of dash shapes. The modeling paste impastos always laid down first and the shapes later carefully colored with a small brush, in a manner reminding us of Hans Hartung’s hand painting of some of his elegant brushstrokes enlarged on canvas from earlier more spontaneous small studies on paper. In the late nineties, with the addition of an outline of a contrasting color to each colored shape, as in “Bleu -2005”, the dissociation of gesture and color became ever clearer. Similar shapes of the same color are often grouped together in arrays which may evoke some of Phillip Taaffe’s early compositional strategies.
Pierre Dunoyer has made a name for himself as a pre-eminent abstract painter within France’s contemporary art scene, but his path into painting was unusual.
Born in Marseille, he studied architecture and psychopathology before starting up his artistic practice in 1976. These two fields seem to coexist still for the artist who makes distinctive and vibrantly lyrical “painted thoughts,” which have been presented at the National Gallery of the Jeu de Paume, the Grand Palais, and Centre Pompidou, all in Paris, as well as the Villa Medici in Rome.
“ A paradox, to add to a series of other paradoxes, is that Pierre Dunoyer’s work is both minimalist and baroque, conceptual and decorative, repetitive and clearly evolving, abrasive yet seductive, to the point of eliciting - following a period of reflection - an almost ‘Matissian’ response. These extremes are also condensed within each painting, as despite the similarities of their forms and colours, each one is a world entirely of its own” - Extract from the foreword to the upcoming Pierre Dunoyer catalogue written by Fabrice Hergott, Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
'Pierre Dunoyer: The 1980s' at the
Nohra Haime Gallery, will continue through to March 25th, 2023.
