Denis Blondel
Paysages d'intérieur....
Painter, expressionist portraits
Portraits, drawings, landscapes...
Denis Blondel artiste peintre
Peinture expressionniste
Denis Blondel, stripped humanity
By Caroline Canault (journalist, art critic)
It is a feverish vision, with multiple readings where the body transforms and mutates. The strangeness spreads over the entire surface of the composition. The artist's touch works on the scrambling effect contributing to a feeling of disorientation.
His carnal portraits leave few defined elements. However, in this dense and unstructured balance, we can distinguish some figurative references ; such as the portrait of the Mona Lisa or a knife...
Denis Blondel strips as much as he humanizes. His works are an invitation to probe the body and the abysses of the soul, the presence and the absence, the ephemeral and the fragility of human existence.
The dark becomes clear, with a recurring white tonality, evoking the powdery body of a make-up traversed by nothingness. This evocation of the transitory nature of life places his work in an evolutionary mobility. Where individual elevation and the opening of perspectives are emerging.
Earthy expressionism... Mirror of art/ November 2017
Rebeyrolle has shown the way. And it's good to see that the road he has traced, others take it in turn, to then free themselves from it and open up new avenues, discover hitherto unexplored territories. Thus Denis Blondel, whose earthy and non-conformist expressionism will delight fans of the late great master, offers us a painting that can be tasted with relish, and which would not have displeased Rabelais, Wolinski or even Bukowski.
The word is high, the color at its peak, each canvas is a snub, or a finger of honor, it depends, to those who would like painting to say only pretty, silly things and custody of all messages.
Like Hermle , for example, Denis Blondel draws inspiration from the constantly renewed spectacle of his contemporaries, and lays on the canvas their daily failings, their sexual miseries, their unattractive lives. Excessiveness and provocation broadly underline his uncompromising vision of a society perceived as a vast farce. There is no dead hand friend Blondel, and some paintings are so many ruthless sarcasms.
His series of Residents, for example, depicts a humanity delivered to its impulses and tinged with boredom.
However, in his paintings emerges at every moment, as in parallel with the subject an unmistakable tenderness. Through his characters with flaccid and relaxed bodies, with big wide eyes, and whose mouths sometimes seem like an abyss at the bottom of which any word will remain inaudible, he never ceases to invite us to more compassion and love. It is a world which oscillates between absurd joys and unfathomable sadness, which the painter summons on the canvas, a world where one falls asleep on Sunday evening in front of the television screen, the head thrown back , where we stick together by reflex as much as by affection, where we die like in the last act of a play by Shakespeare, with a touch of exaggeration.
In truth, Denis Blondel is not only an artist who paints with a scalpel, who caricatures his time, he is also and above all a poet whose crudely worded verses sound like joyful pamphlets thrown in the face of a society. who doesn't even know how to laugh at herself anymore. Since all is lost let us laugh at it, Blondel seems to suggest. And in good company, please.