PATRICK GUIDOT
















FATA MORGANA PAINTING SERIES


                The set of paintings presented reflects the personal, historical and cultural references of the artist Patrick Guidot. Cinema, daily news pictures, music, and the history of art are all sources of his inspiration.
    The title of the exhibition, FATA MORGANA, is a tribute to W. Herzog. In his most intimate film, the director linearly goes through the African desert, showing the landscape as seen from a train. He inquires about the abstract, mysterious, and moving nature that spins like a mirage.
    As the starting point of this series, the mirage has a very particular echo in the characters of women who inspire the Juliane and Viviane paintings that the artist sets up as icons. Juliane Koepcke was the only survivor of a plane crash and survived in the Peruvian forest for several days. In this hostile and exotic natural environment, she managed to find her way. In this same natural environment in New Caledonia, Viviane seeks an imaginary paradise in the film Obscured by Clouds
(B. Schroeder, 1972).
    Like an encyclopedia where definitions and pictures collide with no other relation than the proximity of their spelling, Patrick Guidot organizes his compositions through collages and juxtapositions. Although these encounters may seem fortuitous, there reigns, through the unbleached reserves, negative areas – the framework of a strange narrative.
    These pictorial fictions draw their materiality from repetition and recycling, in which Patrick Guidot revisits and remixes parts of his previous work. The unique and central element of the composition gives way
to the juxtaposition of a uniformly colored surface by considering only these simple elements: gesture (lines), texture (techniques), and weight (colors).
    Patrick Guidot questions his relationship to the image and samples a certain number of images gleaned wherever he can to form his iconographic collection. He also uses multiple techniques such as cutting, dripping, imprints, runs, and even creasing or folding to embrace
the history of art. Processing the images (magnified, filtered, unfinished, precise) erodes knowledge of the drama, which disappears in fictitious time to nourish the time of the painting. For this reason, the context is suggested and fantasized by the spectator.
    Thus, the artist distances the tragedy and violence of emotions too real to promote his gestures instinct, spontaneity, and authenticity in his purposely mastered compositions.




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