| Stéphane Ducret is best known for his paintings of stenciled cut-out designs adhered to cotton canvases dipped in white vinyl. But Ducret possesses a wide range of artistic output, using a combination of techniques and media, including digital photography, painting, or sculptural relief. Ducret’s earliest work, The Rebirth of Cool series, was created in New York City, whilst co-directing the Point Gallery in Chinatown. These works form the foundation for all of his current work, in terms of his investigation of abstraction by the use of graphic iconography in blocks and ribbons of color. Ducret’s work demonstrates proto-op tendencies, through his creation of effects through the use of pattern and line. |  |
Sascha Gianella
Stéphane Ducret is best known for his paintings of stenciled cut-out designs adhered to cotton canvases dipped in white vinyl. But Ducret possesses a wide range of artistic output, using a combination of techniques and media, including digital photography, painting, or sculptural relief.
Ducret’s earliest work, The Rebirth of Cool series, was created in New York City, whilst co-directing the Point Gallery in Chinatown. These works form the foundation for all of his current work, in terms of his investigation of abstraction by the use of graphic iconography in blocks and ribbons of color. Ducret’s work demonstrates proto-op tendencies, through his creation of effects through the use of pattern and line. Op Art is a dynamic visual art, a perceptual experience related to how vision functions, and much of this earlier work relates to the lesser-known color works of Op Art practitioners, and works such as that of Getulio Alviani, who chose aluminum surfaces, treated in order to create patterns of light, which change as the watcher moves to create vibrating texture surfaces.
Although Ducret’s work is not a direct tribute to the concerns of this figure-ground movement, Ducret’s work could be inversely said to be a visual experience which is related to how perception functions. The reflection of shiny surface, and the juxtaposition of highly contrasting colors, which provoke a sense of depth in illusionistic three-dimensional space so that it appears if the architectural shape is invading the viewer’s space, or indeed, that we suddenly become aware of ourselves. The visual Op Art effect is merely a visual distraction that draws us in to our real experience with the work and what lies within.
What lies within is Ducret’s relationship with the modern world. His observation of our general attention to it, and of our fleeting relationship with the people and things within it. How we discard, or disregard detail, without much consideration. His Rebirth of Cool series purposefully disregards detail in itself in appreciation of the detail. Ducret makes no secret of his fondness of the minimalist movement, and his paintings certainly seem to anticipate it. The term “minimalist” is often applied casually to anything that is stripped to its bare essentials or is spare. As geometric abstraction and/or abstract art has been historically likened to music in its ability to convey emotional or expressive feelings and ideas (without reliance upon or reference to recognizable objective forms existent in reality), Ducret’s Rebirth of Cool series is an example of the artist’s dedication to expressing himself and his emotions through minimal gesture.
Ducret’s body of work The Origin of the World is a departure not only in style, but not entirely in ideal; the artist here digitally manipulates masterpieces such as Velasquez’s Las Meninas, 1656, and Leonardo Da Vinci’s Self Portrait, c.1512-1515, in order to draw the observer’s attention to the chaos of the modern world, and his belief that not enough time is spent on actually experiencing a work of art. Who amongst us modern art lovers hasn’t observed the busloads of cultural tourists traipsing through a museum observing major works through the lens of a digital camera, only to disregard the real thing? Take a picture of it, look at it later.
In The Origin of the World series, Ducret explores the superficial perspective of the observer through exacerbated disregard of detail using dramatic pixilation of the masterpieces, thereby forcing a work upon the observer where detailed observation cannot be achieved, and thus inevitably missing the meaning and value that stem from neglected details. The neglected details in both Origin of the World and his more recent body of work Shiny Happy People (The Facebook Project), arise from the method in which the Facebook images are taken, with a standard digital camera, without consideration of lighting or arrangement, which are important basic elements of portrait photography. Thus, the examination of selected images taken from Ducret’s “hundreds” of Facebook friends, shows a considered representation of the modern-day portrait, whilst commenting, perhaps indirectly, on authenticity of the subject’s representation, and ultimately, our experience with it.
I dare not compare Ducret’s work with that of Andy Warhol. Warhol’s aesthetic strategy utilizing contemporary production processes, such as silk screening, allowed him to employ images derived from popular culture, from advertising, the news, publicity prints, and film stills, that directly recalled their sources in photography and their origins in mass reproduction. Andy Warhol had an uncanny ability to select images from the cultural mainstream, and sometimes using “high art,” or masterpieces as his subject matter and influence, most famously, The Mona Lisa, that becomes an image quite independently from its existence as its original painting. Warhol’s Last Supper series has been considered as being unreadable, busy, even “insipid” and “lifeless,” according to writer Anthony Haden-Guest (Warhol’s Last Supper, Artnet, August 3, 1999), “Warhol’s Christ seems wishy-washy, religiose—an icon nobody quite knows.” Perhaps this is the point. The lack of detail, known detail, that is eliminated, that makes the work so interesting. Ducret’s own depictions of found or pre-existing images are also treated with similar ingenuity to standardize, or produce an effect of neutrality or insignificance.
Ducret’s most recent body of work Diamonds are Forever, is a return to the geometric abstractions reminiscent of his earlier work. These works are directly influenced by the shape and form of gemstones and diamonds, again using minimal line and form, to suggest the multi-faceted nature of these precious and revered objects. His intention this time is to focus our attention on the so-called “media propaganda” (such as television, magazines, publicity), and its ability to influence our ignorance of real life issues such as wars, sorrow and disease, and instead, to focus our minds on beauty and affairs that are skin-deep and their derived pleasure. Ignorance is clearly bliss in Ducret’s celebration of surface value in his latest series, yet beyond the evident continuation of line and form, are shards of mirror in meticulously constructed patterns, which dramatically force observers upon themselves. The mirror serves as a reflection of the environment around us, and we are faced, perhaps self-consciously with ourselves, and ultimately with our reality.
Ducret’s return to his earlier technique perhaps shows that he has come to the end of a cycle in his series of works. His use of a neutral palette in this body of work, however, hails itself from the beginnings of the Op Art movement. Most of the better-known pieces of this movement were in black and white. As Optical Art is a method of painting concerned with the interaction between illusion and the picture plan, it is concerned with the division between understanding and merely seeing. When the viewer observes these works, the impression is given of movement, of hidden images, of patterns that vibrate or warp. Ultimately, Ducret’s works draw us in, to see and understand them, to spend more time with them, rather than pass them by in a fleeting moment.
