From the very start, painters were watchful of that moment of balance and harmony when opposites meet up.  This quest, the result of antagonistic relationships and of haphazard accidents, of “pentimenti” and of high wire balancing acts, leads to the ordaining of the support.  However, whatever be the genre, like music, art cannot be described.  It must make sense and also engender affects, a memory and an identity.

Simultaneously talkative and focused, Dimitri Kosiré’s painting does not escape these criteria, but it has managed to strengthen its bases and to hone the semantic undertones that exemplify it.  For, beyond its assumed non-figurative framework, it combines a concrete shape with an abstract thought.  Hence the sometimes ambivalent treatment of images,  affording now and again a glimpse of heads, if not sketched skulls, indistinct body fragments or phosphorescent eyes, spread out over the moving spaces of the canvas.  However, these organic reminiscences, more often suggested than identified, in so far as they are engendered almost surreptitiously, as in a natural prolongation of the gesture, in no way interfere with the coherence of the image and its basically abstract character.  In fact, and we all know this, things are not what they seem, but are what they become. 

Therefore, at the intermingling of two approaches that are not opposed and basically complete each other, Kosiré’s trajectory maintains a studied disorder, in which the ambiguity intrinsic to every aesthetic issue.  And his motley compositions, implemented by an instinctive gesture, are also accompanied with fragments of alphabets, of grids, signs, letters or crosses, that might described as scraps of messages, even sketches of unfinished tales.  Of course, these hieroglyphic marks are not to be found in all of his cursus, taking into account the various contributing factors. 

Nowadays, although Dimitri Kosiré always envisaged himself paintbrush in hand, his beginnings led him to a syntax of proximity, focused on the landscape, very soon overcome by his wish to explore his inner geography, and to free up his energy. As a result, for him the reference just becomes a pretext, which henceforth summons forth the dialectic’s form for form’s sake, and led him to pathways where the unknown provided more discoveries than the known.  And so, strengthened by his know how, from time to time, still lightly scattered with figurative mini-references, but mostly far from the clutches of appearance, his compositions suggest life’s motions in a storm of scratches, strokes, spasmodic islets and cloudy beaches, close to the abstract expressionist’ approach.  At the core of these areas, turbulently peopled, the painter’s touch lightens up or darkens, spreads out or clenches up, and suddenly, once again, secretes some jumbled images, enhanced by strange lights, summoning our imagination.

 But whether it concerns the shutters devoted to “Transpainting” or “Trash-pinté” , two heightened variations on the same vocabulary, are constantly  to be found: the identical collisions of fizzling shapes and colors, whose agitated demands coincide with the heart’s and reason’s outpourings.  But, let us make no mistake about it, these panels filled with superimposed  signs and grids , do not give in to the siren call of automatism, i.e. of the unconscious.  Everything is regulated by a feel for construction that models the canvas’ structure, and does not cast out either the temptation of space, nor the breath of intuition.

In a similar range, Kosiré’s works on paper, in ink, watercolor, or oil, or his collages, do not venture far from his usual mindsets, but taking account of their specific textures, they pinpoint fluidity and shimmering, nimble marks and interlacings enveloped in cloudy fragments – at times the slippery traces of the pen recall the wisdom of Chinese calligraphers who had to be fully aware of their culture and of their discipline before attacking the paper’s texture.  Finally, the velvety expressivity, the delicacy of his meanderings, the interweaving of the chromatic combinations, the gesture’s flights and the balance of all the parts,  emphasize the happy mastery of the artist’s chosen field and they nourish the way he sees himself.

A painter of pure temperament, far from the certainties handed down by Schools and theoreticians, Dimitri Kosiré only expresses what he captures within his innermost self.  And from that hand to hand combat with paint, there comes forth a true joy in creating which goes beyond his own vision.

Gérard Xuriguera

Translated in English by Ann Cremin