Dogon - L’Afrique fantôme, 2024

Dominique Briand  

Dominique Briand develops a work where paper, ink, and color become the main vectors of emotion. Her practice is structured around mixed techniques combining inks, collages, gouache, and, occasionally, gold leaf or watercolor. Each work is created on exceptional papers – notably Japanese paper and mulberry paper – whose fibers, transparency, and texture fully participate in the composition.

Her universe is deeply inspired by nature and symbolism. Branches, birds, plants, horizons, traces, and signs emerge in compositions where reality fades in favor of suggestion. The spaces of silence, the superimpositions of papers, and the plays of transparency invite a contemplative reading, leaving the viewer the freedom to project their own sensibility onto them.

The Japanese aesthetic is a major source of inspiration. Dominique Briand finds in prints their sobriety, balance, and relationship to emptiness, while the work of Henri Matisse nourishes her taste for color, the simplicity of forms, and the freedom of composition. Blue, omnipresent in her work, has become her favorite color. Sometimes deep, sometimes luminous, it evokes the sea, the sky, the breath, time, and infinity, giving her works a meditative atmosphere.

For nearly twenty years, Dominique Briand has regularly exhibited her work in personal and collective exhibitions in Brittany and Paris. She has exhibited notably at the Parlement de Bretagne, the Cité judiciaire de Rennes, within the framework of the Rotary Art exhibitions, as well as at the Espace culturel Références Électriques in Rennes, where she will hold a personal exhibition in 2025. In parallel, she designs posters and sets for several musicals, an activity that nourishes her sense of composition and staging.

Through her creations, Dominique Briand seeks less to represent the world than to reveal its poetry. Her works offer a space to breathe, where the material of the paper, the fluidity of the ink, and the depth of blue compose a sensitive language, between abstraction and evocation.