VG1, 2011

Guillaume Moschini  

Guillaume Moschini’s work is focussed on a gesture, a hue, always carried out in a

very liquid matter. In his paintings, he incessantly mingles inks with acrylic and

methylated spirits. Interested in the limits of the colour field, he paints by combining

rectangular shapes which are not tint areas but traces of a single brushstroke.

For a long time, the artist preferred using rather small-sized frames, making it easier

for him to paint that trace, whose width is strictly determined by the width of the

brush, in a vision which is quite close to Nick Toroni’s. By successive corrections of

“accidental” drips, these shapes sometimes invaded the canvas to turn into a quasi-

monochrome. This practice, which was felt like an obsession, stood for a crucial

change in the artist’s recent apprehension of large-sized frames. Moreover, it had

already characterized his first works, the ones painted with brooms on canvas sheets

up to six metres long and mainly inspired by American abstract paintings. These

resulted from an initial search of vast expanses of colour along with a desire to

penetrate the canvas.

In order to adapt his work to larger dimensions, Moschini started out by assembling

two frames. From that moment on, he designed his paintings in terms of length and

not of height, their various possibilities of arrangement creating new relations

between colour, composition and even scale. Within his quasi-monochromes, shapes

reappeared in the unpainted spaces of the canvas. An emergence accompanied by a

conversion of Moschini’s paintings into drawings, which offers many a variations he

played around with.

Having reached a certain degree of skill in the art of converting a trace into a shape,

he could reproduce his technique on any kind of format and medium. Guillaume

Moschini pays great attention to the selection of the right tool and considers the

choice of the method very carefully. On the one hand, the absolute clarity of his work

requires the use of wider and wider industrial brushes so as to avoid repeated

strokes of paintbrush. On the other hand, in order to be less litteral, the artist willingly

breaks the continuity of the strokes by still using smaller brushes. Thus, he draws

and redraws the story of a shape by changing the way to produce it. The position of

the trace is determined to the naked eye and not according to a specific design or

drawing. It traverses the canvas, no matter where. The only rule to follow is to try to

find a balance between the traces without them having necessarily the same

dimensions.

Choosing large formats compelled Guillaume Moschini to lay his canvasses down on

a table and work the four sides of the frames, which required a real physical

commitment. Paradoxically, for the very exacting professional he is, working on

large-sized frames allows greater control than on smaller ones. He just needs to

stand on little bench to apply the brush most delicately. If his approach is based on

gesture, it refers to no expressionist style.

Furthermore, the artist protects the first trace from the various splutters. However,

some of them are preserved insofar as they pertain to the stability of the painting.

Then, they function as a writing style, a wash tint, a “circumstance” which might be

obsessively controlled and might even be the starting point of a painting. As regards

the artist, he plays with the dichotomy between heaviness and weightlessness.

In this demanding approach, unconsciousness is at work : “My paintings are organic,”

Moschini says. The artist works in series. Each painting remains independent from

the others and is not necessarily intended to be displayed within a predetermined set.

Pieces can function in three, their association or separation depending on their

relation to space and colour.

If Moschini’s work on shape is fundamental, it is a pretext to colour, which stands for

a real project to him. The object, the motive of his approach is the communication

between two colours and even the invention or the discovery of a new colour,

including the one that is not perceptible at first glance, resulting from infinitely

variable combinations… In order for two colours to match, there needs to be a fair

balance between shapes, on the assumption that what is not painted is as important

as what is. Afterwards, the logical harmony between sometimes clashing colours

depends on the evolution of this or that series.

Fascinated by repetitive painting, Moschini develops a more and more distinctive

taste for minimalism and radicalism. In order to show his longing to go straight to the

point by being as light as possible, Moschini does not apply any primer coat to his

canvasses. Instead, he even applies a very transparent coat of diluted colour – a

“jus” –, in direct continuation of Marc Devalde’s experiments. If there are fewer and

fewer hues, colour becomes brighter and brighter.

Moschini’s gesture conveys an emotion, a tension which only arises from playing on

equilibrium and disequilibrium between shapes and colours, excluding any kind of

systematic approach. If this work mostly deals with aesthetics, no aestheticism can

be detected : indeed, Guillaume Moschini’s attention is not focussed on the beauty of

colours, but on their unsteady balance, depending on the exposure conditions and

the viewer who never stops capturing and recreating their values.

Aurélie Barnier, June 2014