David Hominal
No titre (collection 2021)
23 May - 27 Jun 2020
DAVID HOMINAL
No titre (collection 2021)
23 May — 27 June 2020
Painting is a common denominator in David Hominal's work, a physical and sculptural element that traces the genealogy of his multimedia oeuvre, between performance, video, dance, and object. Everything centres around the material quality of painting, which Hominal has continued to develop as a practice, including in its potential to be combined with other media.
In the new series No titre (collection 2021), the subject is colour. Its manipulation over large canvases allows Hominal to get beyond the traditional systems of analysis separating figuration and abstraction. He can incorporate kitsch like he can incorporate tragedy, travelling across the entire history of representation, from still life to portraiture, via landscape. The application of colour becomes the subject of the painting. It is in this context that the flower motifs, in a scrupulous loop, make their grand return to his work, proving he hasn’t lost his touch. Undoubtedly, they have a place in the history of art and they also play a role in his personal and daily life. Yet it is clearly impossible not to think of the symbolic significance of the gestures with which they are most often associated. Offering, paying respects, remembering, giving joy, flowers embody care and devotion, as they are carriers of memory. They are meaningful, totemic, flamboyant, active, and powerful.
On the ground, pieces of wood, gathered and transformed, punctuate the space like coloured talismans and evoke the sacred stones painted in honour of ancient gods. Yet these abandoned totems appear here almost like cast-offs that Hominal has used as surfaces to practice on. Asserting their flashy finish with its evocation of certain available ranges in nail varnish, they contain in a single space both contemporaneity and tradition, ancestral cults and modern customs, blurring levels of culture and our consumer habits. Like washed-up debris, they remind us of something between Land Art and natural phenomena, between gesture and non-gesture, between making and letting things happen. All this with the least staging possible.
Ultimately, David Hominal venerates the history of painting, but doesn’t sanctify it. His work testifies to an extraordinary reverence for art from which he extracts a few universal archetypes that make us feel good and comfort us, but never remain fixed in place. References he cites, contorts, manipulates, challenges. That he gets mesmerized by and above all jokes around with.
Elisa Rigoulet
Born in 1976 in France, DAVID HOMINAL lives and works in Berlin (Germany). His work has been shown in a large number of solo and group exhibitions in France, including the Palais de Tokyo and the Centre culturel suisse in Paris, the Consortium in Dijon, and Magasin in Grenoble; as well as abroad, including the Musée Jenisch in Vevey, the Centre d’édition contemporaine and the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, the Swiss Institute in New York, the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Fri Art in Fribourg, the Kunsthalle Bern, the Kunsthaus Zürich and the CAC–Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius.
No titre (collection 2021)
23 May — 27 June 2020
Painting is a common denominator in David Hominal's work, a physical and sculptural element that traces the genealogy of his multimedia oeuvre, between performance, video, dance, and object. Everything centres around the material quality of painting, which Hominal has continued to develop as a practice, including in its potential to be combined with other media.
In the new series No titre (collection 2021), the subject is colour. Its manipulation over large canvases allows Hominal to get beyond the traditional systems of analysis separating figuration and abstraction. He can incorporate kitsch like he can incorporate tragedy, travelling across the entire history of representation, from still life to portraiture, via landscape. The application of colour becomes the subject of the painting. It is in this context that the flower motifs, in a scrupulous loop, make their grand return to his work, proving he hasn’t lost his touch. Undoubtedly, they have a place in the history of art and they also play a role in his personal and daily life. Yet it is clearly impossible not to think of the symbolic significance of the gestures with which they are most often associated. Offering, paying respects, remembering, giving joy, flowers embody care and devotion, as they are carriers of memory. They are meaningful, totemic, flamboyant, active, and powerful.
On the ground, pieces of wood, gathered and transformed, punctuate the space like coloured talismans and evoke the sacred stones painted in honour of ancient gods. Yet these abandoned totems appear here almost like cast-offs that Hominal has used as surfaces to practice on. Asserting their flashy finish with its evocation of certain available ranges in nail varnish, they contain in a single space both contemporaneity and tradition, ancestral cults and modern customs, blurring levels of culture and our consumer habits. Like washed-up debris, they remind us of something between Land Art and natural phenomena, between gesture and non-gesture, between making and letting things happen. All this with the least staging possible.
Ultimately, David Hominal venerates the history of painting, but doesn’t sanctify it. His work testifies to an extraordinary reverence for art from which he extracts a few universal archetypes that make us feel good and comfort us, but never remain fixed in place. References he cites, contorts, manipulates, challenges. That he gets mesmerized by and above all jokes around with.
Elisa Rigoulet
Born in 1976 in France, DAVID HOMINAL lives and works in Berlin (Germany). His work has been shown in a large number of solo and group exhibitions in France, including the Palais de Tokyo and the Centre culturel suisse in Paris, the Consortium in Dijon, and Magasin in Grenoble; as well as abroad, including the Musée Jenisch in Vevey, the Centre d’édition contemporaine and the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, the Swiss Institute in New York, the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Fri Art in Fribourg, the Kunsthalle Bern, the Kunsthaus Zürich and the CAC–Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius.