Idir Davaine French, 1990

Idir Davaine draws inspiration from the environments we inhabit. Davaine wanders around with a camera in hand, spontaneously taking snapshots of everyday life. The artist has amassed a collection of visuals, of what could be said to be a constellation of different time and space continuums. As certain silhouettes start to emerge from this imagery, Davaine isolates and extracts various shapes and forms belonging to familiar elements, such as plants and trees, incorporating them into his paintings.

This fragmented imagery goes through a process of manipulation, leading to the emergence of distorted forms taking on open and fluid qualities that play on a sense of unusual familiarity. Davaine’s painterly gestures of freeing such forms from their materialities, straddles between the real and the illusory, playing with our perceptions.

Each canvas then bears an assemblage of shapes and forms, decisively manipulated and dispersed to produce a visual composition that hints at storytelling and narrative. Such process sees Davaine’s conscious reiteration of manipulation in his approach that not only challenges, but also plays with our perceptible realities

Davaine’s paintings allude to an illusory of the real. He invites viewers to locate and identify various elements from his paintings, towards unravelling and constructing the narratives behind them on their own terms.