Exhibition in CAROUSEL Gallery (PARIS) February 2001

"We should doubt everything, including our tears", reminds Denis CASTELLAS ( born 1951; lives and works in Nice, France ), one of the great clandestine figures of French art, whose objects and paintings reveal an activation of all images. A dictionary of images, as the words put into flow by Marcel PROUST, all images, portraits of hero writers, pictures of sporting heroes, fragments of 'documents of culture ', porn, comics are pushed by the artist into a state of flux:: a flux of images, at first as if drenched, exhausted through various processes: sometimes fixed by the polaroid, furtherly exhausted on the photocopying machine, collapsed, while simultaneously redrawn by hand, a paling of images reminiscent of the various paling operations in the work of Alighiero e BOETTI. But Denis CASTELLAS's techniques of exhaustion, outlined by Thierry de DUVE as ' techniques of innocence ', are far removed from the technique of the 'flatliners' and their exhaustion of the icons and of the painterly fields of modernism CASTELLAS paints paintings like Luis BUNUEL shot movies: as a pyrotechnist of beauty, a great formal elegance to produce such a mining of all certainties. Far from the academism of some painting machines, the work of CASTELLAS is a permanent fight with form: here the paintings, as many theorems of the plastic deflagration attempted by Denis CASTELLAS open as many sections in visibility as in invisibility. In the series of portraits of Fernando PESSOA to be exhibited, Castellas hollows out all of the frail silhouettes of the Portuguese poet, in a gesture recalling the artist's interest for all figures of speed, to the stylists of touch, 'with agility and speed of foot': Jacques Anquetil, Vitas Gerulaitis, John McEnroe, Robert Mapplethorpe, Mozart or Antoine de Saint Exupery. Denis CASTELLAS is against beauty, close against it, awaiting the grace of gestures. The series of paintings drawing the trembled silhouettes of Fernando PESSOA, exemplifying the artist's interest for shadowed figures, is a suite of shaded figures, blued from souvenir. Here the work of Denis CASTELLAS is reminiscent of the lifelong effort of Marcel PROUST: build a masterpiece from the reworking of sensation by memory, deployed in time and in space. The painting of Denis CASTELLAS reads as much an expiration as a defiguration, helping to understand the relation of some of the paintings to the painted spaces from the Far East paintings, or to some open spaces of field painting, painted with bamboo brushtrokes, such as those of Brice MARDEN or of Jean DEGOTTEX. The work of Denis CASTELLAS reminds us that building a painting is like building consciousness, an active process, embodying a generous idea of art, an active practice of life.