Michèle DESTARAC (1943)

Michèle Destarac is a self-educated artist born in 1943 in Yerre, France. After half a century, Michèle Destarac has been perpetuating and renewing an original dialogue with painting. The gesture, the color and the material of the work is a concert to celebrate the vital chaos, the talluric power, the luminous intensity… and the subtility of these encounters. Sensual densities and raffined dilutions ; eclating tones and infinite shades ; bold tracks here, delicate there ; tension of the compositions… The intuitions and the experiments guide the artist, and serve her lessons.

Destarac admits to almost no subject other than the painting itself. In her first paintings, a horizontal line suggests a sky, an arch evokes a door of entry. But the essential thing is already elsewhere: in the way the material settles or flows, how the colors melt or repel each other, in the calm that can arise from parallel lines or harmonious tones and in the perturbation provoked by a diagonal or bright colors. What Destarac questions is the precise place of change, the impulse at its beginning.

At very rare moments, emerges from the set up a chaos of a distinct silhouette: an armchair in 1970, a palm tree two years later, a few stars in 1989 and a handful of trees three years later; uniquely calm archetypes or, on the contrary, on the burst. No anecdote, no information: the rare motives remain fundamentally networks or confrontations, which provoke or charm the infinite without ever closing it.   

A voluntary isolation, almost mystical, prelude to each series of paintings, beginning simultaneously. The gestures of the artist ricochet one another, until the completion of a set of variations, as it exists in modern music. With all her body, Destarac tells less the history of the world than her palpitations.

“The mystery of what escapes us a bit, is the true Beauty.” she says.

The gallery has published a book about her work, available in the gallery.