Waxing lyrical

 

 

In a changing world, even if “it is no older than on its day of birth” according to  Radiguet, abstract art has never ceased, since its appearance, to strengthen its presence on the artistic cultural front, thanks to the diversity of its styles, and of the men who shaped its path. Grasped as so many steps needed to clarify our understanding of the future of art, the seeming logic of the historical sequences, by isolating the pioneers, should not hide the ongoing contributions, which have replenished the tendency and favored its greater breadth. In that way, one must take into account the respective tributes to it, paid by the younger generations.

 

Dimitri Kosiré belongs to that fringe of abstract artists who proclaim their language’s autonomy and who come to terms with their choices.  Unlike many peers of his generation, he did not favor the new technologies, and did not allow himself to be influenced by the numerical aesthetics, currently prevailing.  So, without in any way turning down the new tools provided for contemporary artists, he remains deeply attached to the painterly act for he believes in its continuity, in the hands-on approach to the material, its tactile value, the sensuality of its touch, the smoothness of textures and in the humanistic fiber of his practice.

 

However, Kosiré’s approach is linked to his times’ history and to a manner of thinking. Simultaneously lyrical and informal, but sufficiently personal to break away from a specific control, it is chiefly valuable through its open-mindedness, its seeking out of other structural layouts, and through the sum of the psycho-affective connotations that describe it, alongside its formalist recordings. Freed from any metaphor, even if the aggregates of rough paste that make it up, might take on telluric accents, frothing and bubbling, its viability is based on the backwash of a spasmodic gesture that begets depths and surges of serrated matter around several luminous sources, accompanied by a simultaneous projection of his inner geography. Except for the fact that his maps do not refer to any specific places and are not landscapes, but only paint freed by means of the most blazing part of felt sensations.

 

Following a somewhat calmed down period, made up of flat surfaces, and of rhythms flowing between complicity and fluidity, Kosiré has moved on to a vocabulary of stormier matters, at the very edge of a certain dramatic intensity. By synthesizing the coating of his units, he henceforth develops a more eruptive form of writing, vigorously stirred and labored, of crumbled masses, dotted with shimmering ripples and intermittent wisps, where we feel we are being aspired through a volcanic bubble. No systematization comes to trouble the ordaining of his effervescent doorways, where each gesture is the confirmation of a presence and the sign of an undergone experience.

 

Nowadays, to uphold his syntax, Kosiré does not paint totally within a feeling of urgency, but in concentration. Having controlled the arm’s pressure, he knows how to pick out, while he is at it, the best visual angle, the adequate layouts, the steps from one tonality to another, alternating the exchanges or displacing the federating centers, according to the support’s architecture, and finally, adjusting the compatibility of the incomplete areas, and, following the Song masters, freeing himself from the line of horizon and of depth, in favor of a frontal perspective.

 

With no other message than that of expressing himself via the means of painting, by following only his own path, Dimitri Kosiré’s œuvre is quite naturally inscribed within today’s cultural landscape. Powerful and tonic, it provides it with the freshness of an independent eye.

 

Gérard Xuriguera (art critic, art historian, curator)

Translated into English by Ann Cremin