Idir Davaine

Summer 2021

Winter 2022

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Idir was in residence at Le Marais twice, in the Summer of 2021, and during Winter of 2022. The moments spent outside of the studio, wandering in the forest, were decisive during his residences. The respective atmospheres of the two seasons can be felt in his paintings. The softness of the weeping willows from Summer and the aridity of the dead vegetation in Winter have inspired his series of drawings and paintings. The darkness of the colors of the Winter season can be found in his Winter series, which never misses a part of light.

Idir defines his paintings as construction games, where shapes are piled up and intertwined. He is able to transpose to his painting the feeling of immobility of the cold season, Nature’s hibernation, and his shapes, also immobile, seem on the verge of toppling over one another, collapsing. The viewers are invited to locate and identify the different elements of the painting, and elaborate freely the narratives that underlie them. 

It is the fragility of our reality, made out of intertwined narratives, that Idir underlines here.

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About

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Idir Davaine was born in 1990, and graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2017. 

Landscapes are often a starting point in his work. Idir finds hidden signs from details of photographs of spaces he collects, and likes to reveal and decipher them. He isolates and extracts these varying forms from familiar elements and incorporates them into his paintings. By introducing these unique shapes, Idir likes to play with his viewers, freed from their realistic composure, they sometimes are recognisable and sometimes sink into abstraction.

This approach aims to sketch out another possible reading of reality, inviting us to pay less artificial attention to it, and to go beyond the apparent banality of things.

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