DARCIA LABROSSE/ Statement
Electrostatic paint on aluminium
In this era of transhumance and deterritorialization, my work is a trace left by a performance in a factory setting, far from the habitual painting studio space. In contrast to an actual ritualistic praxis, I use a highly sophisticated medium: electrostatic paint, also known as powdercoating, on sheets of aluminum, copper or Cor-ten steel. The process is fast and conducive method that facilitates immediacy of thought and feeling, challenging a fine line between figure and abstraction, traveling from the unconscious to the conscious. Electromagnetic fields as a phenomenon, a life force and a binding agent, have become a unique and essential partner in my creative activity.
On a technical level, my strong interests in architecture, my welding apprenticeship followed by years of aimless roaming through heavy industries, building sites, ports, shipyards and foundries, led me to recognize metal as the appropriate medium for what I want to express. The end product is an art impervious to the elements: the paintings can be displayed both on standard walls or safely exposed in the outside world, in situ, where they can easily morph into sculptures, adding a rich architectural dimension to an otherwise intimate and delicate Fine Art.
My paintings are essentially intuitive, gestural, vitalist action-painting executed at the confluence of Fine Arts, alchemy and the rough, cool detachment of the industrial world. With its figurative undertones, my work is an oscillation between two worlds with the abstract constantly feeding the tension figure/ground. In the last decade, the Metal Language corpus I have labelled Existential Expressionism, is willfully branching out from the Abstract Expressionist tradition, primarily because of “its fierce attachment to psychic self-expression…less a style than an attitude”*.
Overcoming the gravity of representation, automatism and acquired reflexes, I mix brute force and translucid emotions to paint an ontological, disquieting, enigmatic human figure free from artifice, universal in its expression.
Fascination with the distorted human body is primordial to my art, resounding the catastrophic events of Minamata with its indirect repercussions on Butoh, the mummies of the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, the five-thousand-year-old Iceman, and more recently, the apocalyptic appearance of Rick Genest’s entirely tattooed body as he represents himself as both art and skeleton. It brings to mind Ensor, Soutine, Bacon’s fascination with teratology, De Kooning, Dubuffet and the CoBrA movement, Basquiat, Freud and so many other artists who have tried to push the human body’s envelope without completely losing perspective of its humanity.
*ART Speaks, Robert Atkins, Abbeville Press, 1990, p.34