Working Taste

Michel Daigneault‘s painting is resolutely abstract. It anchors its foundations on issues specific to the very practice of abstraction in painting today. He revisits the code of colors, shapes and titles of this painting to emancipate the practice and open it to other social realities, also coded, such as the world of media, industrial objects and cosmetics.

In his paintings, Michel Daigneault uses complex visual strategies and processes, degraded, plastic rhymes, repetitions of identical forms without patterns, functioning as patterns on the surface of the painting. These forms that float on the bottom play with our eyes and pass behind the bottom, the planes move and lay in an architecture where the depth is illusion. These pictorial layers destabilize the viewer’s perception by sometimes reminding him of distant views of landscapes, which interfere with close-up shots of rock formations, sometimes topographic aerial views. These different spaces together in the same table suggest to the attentive observer that he occupies all these different places at the same time. It is the very structure of the story that is pointed out.

The painter likes to blur the tracks and force the viewer to look at things differently. Although its visual language refers to the landscape, the paintings use a color palette opposite to that of nature. Daigneault chooses tones belonging to the world of appearances and artifices, such as the pastels of cosmetics or the bright and seductive colors of the design packaging of consumer products.

Finally, the titles direct the reading of works. If, by their titles, the old paintings took a stand in relation to the history of abstract painting, with for example I was once abstract, today with titles like Séduire or Obnubiler, Daigneault speaks rather of the same experience as arouses the picture in the viewer or its reception.

Press release