DIDIER SANCEY, MULTIDISCIPLINARY VISUAL ARTIST, PAINTER, ARCHITECT.
Biography and approach.
Biography and approach.
The two are intimately linked: I have practiced several trades, I am a painter since the beginning and I was an architect in private practice until 1992 with Alice Sancey. I exhibited in Quebec from 1991 to 2015, in the Riverin-Arlogos gallery. I was a teacher at the ensaPB (école nationale supérieure d'architecture de Paris Belleville) from 1975 to 2014, in several disciplines: drawing, perspective, architecture, and video. I invented and directed the "laboratory of image and color”.
The knowledge of color theories, and that of the project, then led me to make artistic projects for architecture.
I was the winner of several competitions, for stained glass windows, in secular and religious buildings, modern and "historical monuments" and for monumental paintings.
This experience of color in the space of architecture, by the light that crosses the colored glass, was a dazzling, and modified my work as a painter. I thus participated in several collective exhibitions on the stained glass, in Chartres and Paris.
My approach is a mental game
My approach is a mental game: a research on colors, through their juxtaposition and superimposition, their relationship in the two dimensions of the canvas or in the three dimensions of space.
I began this work in 1968 with styling essays, silk scarves and dresses, where the colors envelop the body in movement, and then I discovered the complexity of architectural space during my studies.
It took me a long time to understand it, but I now know that I am a painter and an architect, both together. Writing is a tool for projectual and personal analysis.
Writing and video, freeze-frames, have been ways to explore reality, the unconscious and dreams. Unexpected bifurcations. One of these dreams is at the origin of the series of large canvases on urban spaces and large portraits of passers-by crossed in the cities of Montreal, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Lille and Chartres. Large and small paintings.
Back to color.
In 2020, during the confinement, after a series on fractals (paintings and stained glass from 2009 to 2015) I started another series, "Red, yellow, blue, and the others", an exploration of colors, in their relations of proximity on the canvas or in space, always observing visual phenomena like retinal persistence.
It is the simultaneity of experiences of architecture, color, unconsciousness that led me to think of painting as a project (or a writing without filter).
The small recent paintings are like projects, or sketches, worlds where geometry and colors are superimposed and cover the paintings of older series; a few strokes, like a sketch or a line, transform the space of the canvas.
The large recent paintings ... I am painting them.
Didier Sancey, February 2023.