The overabundance of images to which Denis Castellas has resorted in his painting - portraits of children, musicians, philosophers, reproductions of various objects, elements of comic strips, etc. - could lead to the conclusion that his work, drawing on such diverse registers, is itself part of the immeasurable and proliferating contemporary iconography. One only has to look at his works to realise that the image that appears on the canvas is perhaps only an alibi, a pretext for affirming the primary reality of painting and the gesture that underlies it.
Without obscuring the deep meanings of the subjects represented, without forgetting the resonances that they may evoke, each canvas that the artist creates is a construction site in which the visible forms are the result of numerous interventions in which the coloured traces or other graphic signs cohabit with the marks of erasing and erasing, of covering and saturation.
The works the artist is currently working on give these assumed repentances a new status where uncertainty and wandering demonstrate their creative force.
As the artist himself states, "the exhibition at the Chagall Museum is essentially made up of works produced in the last two years and objects produced in the 1980s or 1990s. The works of the last few years mark a break with the previous pictorial period, just as the objects marked a break with what preceded them. Apart from the simplification of the gestures in the implementation, I think that in both cases we are confronted with a feeling of poetry as a reading of the world and as a means of inhabiting it.
Open every day except Tuesdays, 25 December and 1 January.
From 2 May to 31 October: from 10am to 6pm
From November 1st to April 30th: from 10am to 5pm
Ticket sales stop 30 minutes before the museum closes.
Prices (including the permanent collection)
Full price: €9
Reduced rate: €7
Group rates: €7.50 (from 10 people)
