Gérard Traquandi, «Three years of his art»
Patrick Javault invites artist Gérard Traquandi on the occasion of the publication of GT by P. edition
Many of us have probably long forgotten that in January 2009, Marseille was covered with a thick layer of snow for two days. Gérard Traquandi has a good reason to remember it, since that moment marked a change in his artistic practice.
To « free [himself] of [his] own gesture, » he developed techniques to take prints and transfer them to reveal hidden paintings under surface layers of paint. These large or very large all-overs, which revisit part of the history of abstraction, take a different approach to nature (textures, surfaces, chemicals…).
GT, a book designed in close collaboration with publisher and friend Denis Prisset, shows this three-year production through photographs of the studios and their relation to lines, drawings, landscape photographs. Baldine Saint Girons’s text constitutes an opening in the book while putting creation into perspective.
Presenting the book or getting the book to speak: this is what we will try to do with Gérard Traquandi, with one of his paintings by his side.
