MARC-ANTOINE DECAVÈLE

Born in Villefranche sur Saône in 1981, Marc-Antoine Decavèle graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2005, where he also studied literature at the Collège de France.

His paintings have a fragility that demands to be seen. The material is not there to produce the precision of a particular state, but to produce the indeterminacy of a state. In this way, his work attempts to blend matter and acuity, to reconnect the intelligent and the sensitive. We find ourselves at the heart of the visible, somewhere between lightening and slipping. Sébastien Hoet writes of his work: “The problem is no longer to ‘make visible’ as Klee said, but to allow the invisible to emerge in the visible.”

When he first exhibited at La Galerie Valérie Eymeric in 2015, he began using the low-pressure spray gun: his style is abstract “nuagist”. In 2017, Marc-Antoine Deacvèle presents subtle works, like halos of light or suggestive blurs. His tones are different. A call to the eye, to meditation, to the search for the visible. An immersion in blue. A tribute to Malévich. He was then selected three times for ART PARIS with La Galerie Valérie Eymeric (2018, 2019 and 2020).

For his third solo show at Galerie Valérie Eymeric in 2020, he continues his pictorial research, creating small formats that he had not dared to exhibit until now, as the use of a high-pressure gun requires impeccable dexterity for small works. Malévich is always present in this series number III. A catalog has been published for the occasion, with a foreword by Jean-Claude Marcadé, renowned for his work on the Russian avant-garde and in particular the great painter of Suprematism. He befriended the young painter from Lyon, one of whose works is in his personal collection. In 2021, for his solo show in my gallery, he will be pursuing his research tirelessly, and creating a new ensemble: “pour Malévitch – les dormitions”. The idea would be to move pictoriality towards a dialogue with Byzantine art and Russian icons, and more particularly their dormitions, where the horizontality of death and the mandorla are linked. The notion of the image is pushed back to give greater expression to that of the icon, in other words, to emphasize presence, revelation and transformation.

In 2024, the artist presented “L’antre des nymphes”. From the darkness, their mystery embodies nature’s liveliness, revealing nature’s dancing character. The artist attempts to give presence to the event of crystallization produced by the nymphs. This floating through which form and matter find themselves irresolute. The mother-of-pearl or mist of nymphs is like a suspension between two different things. These tensions are manifold: between imagination and memory, between stillness and movement, between sleep and wakefulness, between image and reality, between metamorphosis and spectrality, between gesture and apparition…

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