No.498, 2023

Raphael Durans  

Raphael Durans is a French minimalist abstract artist born in 1949 who lives & works in Marrakech, Morocco. He started his career in nineties in France. We can define the work of Raphael as abstract, geometric, reflective and using a little color. As Frank Stella said: "What you see is what you see, what you see is what you see, there is nothing to discover other than a surface that cuts out on a wall and indicates in negative the space around him." Works of Raphael Durans are quite similar to works of Frank Stella but above all in the presentation of his shaped canvas and not in their design spirit. This term designates paintings made on cut-out canvases or canvases in non-rectangular shapes. The paintings were, so to speak, generated in ToTo by the specific shapes of their outer edges. The goal of this approach is to see the shape of the object as such for a scale and not the representation of a scale in a frame. It's a relation such as frame shaped canvas that is the current image of an object scale that it's supposed to represent and not that of an object scaled & painted inside a rectangular frame.