N°511, 2022

Michel Castanet (Mica)  

"The first gestures of the canvas are free, freedom is the starting point".

Fascinated by color and the Basque country where he has lived for more than 40 years, the artist Mica began with the first monumental canvases made of large assembled sheets on which he put wood, welded mesh... which he then painted with colors of the Ikurina thus deliberately limiting the choice of colors. It has now turned to more easily mobile formats. Modifying his painting, this change of format led the artist to new horizons. His relationship to matter, to pigments no longer has any constraints, the artist's canvases are an explosion of colors. From minimalism to the evocation of a landscape, Mica's works transmit to us the breath of energy crossing his region between peaks and rough seas. The movement of the composition is combined with the material, suggesting the use of brushes, knives, sands. The artist works on several canvases at the same time and returns many times to the same work, sometimes it will take him thirty passages... Mica is in search of a vibration, qualifying his work as "sound textures" he perceives the keys that he places like the notes of a musical score. He is currently looking for a less immediate, more internal reading. Mica then lets himself be guided by painting: indeed, autonomous at first, the gesture evolves according to the forms instinctively appeared until becoming captive of the composition which is taking shape.