Gaël Darras

From the pattern of the brick, a tirelessly repeated unit, Gaël Darras constructs architectural spaces in a minimalist style with watercolors. His buildings, stripped of all functionality, are devoid of spatial contextualization and precise time markers — they take us to a distant antiquity as much as they evoke our contemporary masonry. They float in the matrix whiteness of the paper, sections of which are left blank, like virtual volumes, mirages emerging from a blinding desert. These constructions cannot be inhabited, cannot penetrate each other: they are walls. They show as much as they hide, pushing the gaze to seek beyond. Their borders send us back to our intimacy, like "inner temples" whose entrance door is kept secret. 

The systematic use of iron oxide as a pigment (the very one that gives the brick its red color) unfolds a monochrome and contemplative universe where each brick vibrates with a particular density. Gaël uses tools common to architects and painters (cavalry perspective, vanishing point, ruler, compasses, square) and is interested in different traditions and techniques of image composition. He draws in particular from the symbolic geometry inherited from the illuminators of the Middle Ages (golden proportions, dynamic rectangles, polygons, etc.) and from the history of the fresco, from the Pompeian villas to the chapels of the Italian primitives. At different scales of his work, a modular principle is reiterated which proceeds from the fragment and the matrix. The accumulation of bricks draws the shapes, the tight framings alternate with the overviews, the images are cut out and assembled in polyptychs.