Anoine Duhamel
January 15 - February 15, 2012

Antoine Duhamel’s paintings contain a commanding and poetic wildness of character. In these graphic and meticulously composed pictures, Duhamel features portraits, reclined nudes, and men on horseback, all iconic subjects throughout the history of western art. Yet Duhamel’s nuanced and blunt use of colour imposes certain wildness both intellectually and sentimentally. In one painting the shifting fields of color between a woman’s golden yellow face, puke green torso and purple genitals fragment our reading of the body and swing us a step away from the obvious. The implications of these hues undermine the picture at large; the body is not accessible in a standard way as Duhamel’s application of colour antagonizes normal perception. In another painting, a Nazi general is rendered in pure red, the hue of his skin stealing our attention away from the general himself and the history the symbols represent. It is in this way that Duhamel’s strange cast of characters take the brunt of his painterly confrontation with the syntax of visual culture.

Loud Friction Painting  / Peinture Haute Friction