Mathieu
Dafflon

Practicing painting in all its many forms with a technical mastery that dares to tackle every format and a gestural style that is equal parts virtuosity and chaos, Mathieu Dafflon has been constructing an art that is shot through with history. Well aware of the art movements that have come before him, and deliberately using the style and subjects of great 20th-century painters like Karel Appel, Glenn Brown, Franz Gertsch, Malcolm Morley, and Steven Parrino, Dafflon transforms quotation into a genre, which he perfectly assimilates in his personal artistic vein. In his painting, expressionist gestures and hyperrealist features run into each other, occasionally fusing with elements drawn from magazines or comic books. Pigments and colors are expressed in a kind of channel-hopping that promotes a dynamic vision of the contemporaneity of our images. Without suggesting any particular hierarchy, the artist offers images that are as likely to be currently admired as out of fashion, and in good taste as much as in bad, in an uninhibited rereading of contemporary art’s recent history. When Dafflon reinterprets a work of art, he does so overtly by at least conjuring it up in the title.