Alexandre Kasproviez

Alexandre Kasproviez spent his childhood in Reunion Island and the South-West of France before studying in Paris and Hong Kong. At this moment, the artist resides and works between Paris and Madrid, both influenced by the slow life by the ocean in his youth and the vibrant urban lifestyle of both capital cities.

This juxtaposition is essential to grasp Kasproviez’s work. One encounters beneath those delicate transparent brushstrokes an intimate and effervescent visual adventure based on the artist’s direct experiences and memories. His creative process consists of building up the painting with various layers of oil paint, blocking out the composition, before carefully manipulating the painterly surface to add an intimate filter on top of the picture.

By removing, blurring, erasing, and painting, the original image starts to dissolve, as if the subject continues to nestle deeper and deeper into the canvas. This complex creative process creates an unusual distance between the viewer and the subject. Even when standing very close in front of the canvas, the subject is protected by the subtractive painting process, suggesting not only a feeling of vulnerability and closeness but also adding an intimate filter to his figures—as if gazing into a distant and personal memory of the artist.

Painting has a long-standing tradition of being the world’s visual collective and personal memory—think of history painting in the tradition of battlefields, coronations, and revolutions encompassing Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) and Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), preserving knowledge as a form of proto-science with Jan van Eyck (1390-1441) Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1525/1530-1569), or with portraiture to immortalizing and remembering people throughout history. However, with the arrival of photography, painting became obsolete in preserving visual information, yet it remained the privileged medium to communicate memories.

Whereas photography captures a snapshot of reality, memory consists of a durational aspect, encompassing a more extended period—precisely the first crucial difference between painting and photography. Further, whereas photography is a mechanical testimony of history, painting possesses a metaphysical dimension reflected in the paint’s material qualities and the visible traces of the gestures of the artist.

Alexandre Kasproviez connects the durational element of memory with the durational aspect of the painterly process—hence its visibility. And yet, on the other hand, paradoxically, this sincere, honest, and intimate dimension of the artist’s presence blurs the picture, dissolving the image and protecting the subject—a symbolic and metaphorical act by the artist considering the personal traces in the selected imagery.

Arguably, the most striking influence and painterly dialogue must be with the omnipresent Gerhard Richter. Richter used photography as his starting point before painting his source material in a characteristic horizontal haze.

The German artist was fascinated by this dialectic relation between the photograph’s objectivity and the painting’s subjectivity. By blurring the picture, everything becomes equal in the image—equally essential and similarly unimportant.

Yet, a more striking dialogue can be found with YZ Kami and his silent portraits. Throughout his career, the Iranian-American artist painted portraits, slowly but surely, they became less like conventional portraits—the faces became increasingly absent. Slightly, but surely. The figuration becomes flou, dissolves, and abstraction finds its way into his oeuvre.

A crucial aspect of Kami’s portraits is the notion of movement, linked to the durational part of painting and the idea of the depiction of the face as a memory. As with YZ Kami, Kasproviez’s monochromatic and large-scale portraits either look directly at the viewer or with the eyes closed in a mysterious meditative state.

Further, the notion of intimacy is emphasized in this process. Kami paints his friends and family—think of his mother (see image below on the left)—and Kasproviez paints images related to his memories and youth.

There is also a certain connection with Andy Denzler regarding the complex technique of repetitive wide brushstrokes across the canvas.

With Andy Denzler, one encounters gestural expression in alternating horizontal bands of moving versus unmoving impasto paint. The artist suggests movement while depicting a frozen moment in time. By doing so, he addresses time and evokes a narrative due to the suggestion of movement—juxtaposing movement with the snapshot of a photograph.

There is something inexplicably satisfying in those impasto brushstrokes—a technique both painters master convincingly. As a result, this sensation of movement also seems to reside in Kasproviez’s work, even though it feels as if the memory is moving along with the brush of the artist instead of the snapshot photograph.

Kasproviez escapes the snapshot and enters the time and space continuum. As a result, one can experience the memory’s intimacy, the creative process’s materiality, and the sensibility in which the first is connected to the latter in painting.

Discover more on Alexandre Kasproviez’s website.