Idir Davaine: Sneaky Treasures

SNEAKY TREASURES IDIR DAVAINE 5 - 20 SEPTEMBER 2020

Cuturi Gallery is a next generation art gallery founded on the belief that art should be empowering and meaningful for everyone. A curator of change and a custodian of artistic diversity, Cuturi Gallery is a challenger of vested interests and of the status quo, pushing the boundaries of how galleries operate. The gallery connects broad audiences to high-quality art by diverse talents that speaks to the heart and tells the story of an undiscovered generation of aspiring artists that will have the art world aching for more. Diminishing aristocratic traditions and providing transparency in an art world that is at times daunting, Cuturi Gallery presents an inclusive and democratised art ecosystem which fosters greater collaboration, understanding and appreciation of art amongst artists, collectors and the industry at large.

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Cuturi Gallery is delighted to present Sneaky Treasures, a solo exhibition by French artist Idir Davaine (b. 1990, France). Adopting a seemingly playful and intuitive approach, Davaine returns with his polychromatic palette, coupled with his latest exploration of liberating forms in this series of nine paintings across canvas and paper. Drawing inspiration from the environments we inhabit, Davaine wanders around with a camera in hand, spontaneously taking snapshots of everyday life. The artist has amassed a collection of visuals, of what could be said to be a constellation of different time and space continuums. As certain silhouettes start to emerge from this imagery, Davaine isolates and extracts various shapes and forms belonging to familiar elements, such as plants and trees, incorporating them into his paintings. This fragmented imagery goes through a process of manipulation, leading to the emergence of distorted forms taking on open and fluid qualities that play on a sense of unusual familiarity. Davaine’s painterly gestures of freeing such forms from their materialities, straddles between the real and the illusory, playing with our perceptions. In working towards the composition of his paintings, Davaine amalgamates the fragmented and distorted elements painted. Each canvas then bears an assemblage of shapes and forms, decisively manipulated and dispersed to produce a visual composition that hints at storytelling and narrative. Such process sees Davaine’s conscious reiteration of manipulation in his approach that not only challenges, but also plays with our perceptible realities. By creating his own imaginary world, the artist invites viewers to participate in a game of visual deception, so as to uncover and interpret the hidden narratives behind his paintings. Working with acrylic, Davaine interlocks a multitude of colours, where the viewer can easily find more than ten colours within each canvas. Each colour corresponds to a particular intention on the part of the artist, towards constructing a narrative. Such can be observed with the gamut of earthy colours, punctured with coral pink and varying tones of blue in Sans-titre (Bronze, Marais, Coeur, Couleuvre), 2020 Untitled (Bronze, Swamp, Heart, Snake), 2020. As with the nature of Davaine’s works, the painting demands time and effort of the viewer, where we see anthropomorphic forms beginning to emerge amidst the aggregation of manipulated shapes. In La Sœur (Collier Précieux, Ombre Pourpre, Ciel Bleu), 2020 The Sister (Precious Necklace, Purple Shadow, Blue Sky), 2020, Davaine lures us with distorted forms in varying shades of green, suggestive of lush greenery found in landscape such as a forest or garden. The splash of red, alongside a shape evocative of an apple, could be said to allude to the Garden of Eden. Such reading of the earthly paradise is anchored by a purple silhouette bearing undulated waves, alike the slithering of a snake. While this interplay between the shapes and colour could coalesce to form such a narrative, Davaine still leaves much to the imagination of the viewer with the openness of his paintings. Together, Davaine’s paintings point to an illusory of the real. He invites viewers to locate and identify various elements from his paintings, towards unravelling and constructing the narratives behind them on their own terms.

SNEAKY ARTIFICIALIS TREASURES: IDIR DAVAINE ANIMA

La SÅ&#x201C;ur (Collier Precieux, Ombre Pourpre, Ciel Bleu), 2020 The Sister (Precious Necklace, Purple Shadow, Blue Sky), 2020 Acrylic on canvas 140 x 111 cm