Idir Davaine, Eclatax Sunshine: Ketabi Bourdet - 22, passage Dauphine, 75006 Paris

The blazing sun breathes from the tips of its lips a cloud of rays that come to caress the winds and the earth. Here below, along the winding paths, the artist wanders through the forest of signs and gathers the symbols that will serve him in the future as muses. Yet the circular gesture asserts itself with every use; the form withers and disappears, only to mischievously reappear in other bodies.

At the beginning, Idir Davaine’s intuition brings forth a sunflower. Is it the nymph Clytie, rejected by Apollo, who hides beneath this flower? The latter raises the flag of hope. “Am I in love? Yes, since I wait,” declared Roland Barthes. The figure takes root, exposes itself, and finds refuge in the artist’s canvases. One never knows where the painting is going. Abstraction enters into friction with what we seem to perceive. As we move through the works, we think we recognise, as when observing clouds, forms in the process of emerging: is it the fruit of our imagination? A mirage? A hallucination? Is it the sun that makes us see flying saucers, looped apparitions of Albator, roses, sunflowers?

The pupils dilate, and that is precisely what is needed: to let go, because here the form is merely a point of reference; it unsettles us, undulates before us, mocks us. It multiplies, fragments, and comes to spread the colours so dear to their creator.

The images impose themselves. They even seem to emerge from the familiar motifs we know from the painter, relegating them to the background. This moment of construction, the fact that one can read the moments of hesitation and pentimenti beneath the visible layers of paint, is essential. The presence of preserved and superimposed fragments of sketches is still warm: these ghost forms bear witness to what once existed. The painter possesses a singular power: that of capturing memories, feeding this being of memory, or, to borrow the title of one of the paintings, this “tree of fossils.” “I was thinking of those blue tree branches, like charred trunks, and then, somewhat improvised, came spiral gestures scattered across the canvas, like snail shells echoing a work on paper that was itself the continuation of the black painting, made of circles and eclipses. That’s often how it happens: the gestures leap from one painting to another in a kind of continuity that binds them together.”

Everything blends together.

The journey through these coloured waters leads the viewer to fully embrace Idir Davaine’s universe. We are drawn into the work and encouraged to follow our inner compass. To the North, the sun, of course; to the South, the earth; to the East, water; but let us not forget the breath of the wind in the West. It is the wind that comes to strike the canvases with its seal and imprint the final gestures with a palpable fragility. The canvases resonate with one another and sing, as the artist’s heart spills forth.

Elise Roche