Denis Riout – Monochrome painting

Description

The monochrome – the white square on a white background – is an ambiguous object. Absence of representation, it is the invisible made visible. It seems to give access to the quintessence of pictorial truth: an icon. Melancholy, it brings out the derision of a painting on the breath and on the breath: comedians return from these paintings that spin young chlorotic girls on a background of snow … Between the absolute and nihilism, the genre deploys its immense and paradoxical possibilities: colors, sizes, materials make the richness of the monochrome. Denys Riout maps this territory in a non-chronological procedure but logically: going back from Yves Klein, the ironic precursors of the nineteenth century, he shows that the image is not the other discourse, but a mode of existence of knowledge.