HOW TO BE AN AMAZING DESIGNER
Gustave Didelot
We are delighted to open Gustave Didelot’s first exhibition in Basel where his complex 'World of Painting' can be experienced by the visitors. We warmly welcome you to visit the show at our space.
HOW TO BE AN AMAZING DESIGNER
In oil painting, Gustave Didelot’s gesture remains inseparable from the creation of a territory, imagined in reality, lived in fiction. A territory in perpetual expansion, that of Painting. A "World of Painting", where you never rest.
The Artist’s painting is a representation of augmented life. Carried by a dialectical tension between contradictory signs: the bristles of the brushes abdicate their softness to ignite or flank themselves with axes; spectral shapes rub shoulders with lovers who embrace; sugar characters— gingerbread men and honey-man— slow down under their own inoffensiveness. But the telluric describes ambition: no territory without land, and to make it visible, we must push back the horizon lines to the top of the frame. (Ex) posing his canvases on the floor. painting sands moving, which the artist invites us to tread on to submerge in Painting.
The immersive universe is the avowed objective of Gustave Didelot. Himself a gamer, his painting seems to be a link between the surrealistic inspiration and the visual charter of the video game.
Fantasy, movement, violence are on the menu of the canvases. No more than emotions that they inspire. Neither the large format they inhabit. Neither the dynamism of the composition, or even all of these elements combined. There is, at the heart of the work, something that resists to interpretation, and it is precisely in this resistance that the World of Painting acquires its coherent character, overflowing the frame and imposing itself as a valid universe. Not just as fiction.
Rather as reality new, the very one that emerges from a dream or a nightmare and continues, sometimes for a long time, to act on us from within.
Three points and a bar. This arrangement is omnipresent, placed on everything that would like to be face. A face that is never one, not even a sketch. Rather an element of language, like a segment of the Morse alphabet, adorning everything that is intended to come to life in this World of Painting. They look like golems! Golems- cups, -grids -chairs -butterflies.
And painting golems too. Because the painting of Gustave Didelot represents itself, mise en abyme in a humorous dimension. Otherwise, what would be the meaning of these nails on the canvas slices? As a way to tame and fully appropriate this old art overwhelming that is painting.
Among the artists he studied to achieve this, Marnie Weber and Philip Guston marked him decisively. From the disturbing fantasy of the first, to the fleshy layout full of self- mockery of the second, Gustave Didelot took “what makes him feel good”.
This is perhaps what the artist postulates: a better world to which we must never stop to believe. Let's welcome it, let's celebrate it, at least for the time of a look.
Tina Allison Wetchy
Master of Visual Arts in Critical, Curatorial and Cybermedia Studies at HEAD – Geneva, Switzerland
