Loïc Le Groumellec

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Loïc Le Groumellec (November 8 - December 31, 2008).

After eight years of absence, French painter Loïc le Groumellec presents in our space Impasse Beaubourg, a series of new canvases exploring his famous minimalist iconography. Standing stones, crosses, houses, Dolmens - all acting as mysterious traces, halfway between the sacred and the profane.

Since the eighties, Loïc Le Groumellec occupies an original position among French painters. His canvases, saturated with white and black enamel, seemingly repetitive, have a direct visual impact. Their uncanny simplicity ingrains the memory at a subliminal level. The artist represents strong symbols in a very limited chromatic scale, defining an unfamiliar universe bathed in mysticism and paganism. As the artist explains, « my reflexion is based on oppositions. The entire structure is based on conflicts : laying down paint while erasing it with a rag, black/white, root/elevation, deconstruction/reconstruction, the mass of a pagan object, the Christian cross and the telluric cross. »

His use of lacquer paint gives a unique brightness to the canvas. This effect is accentuated by his erasing technique. The artist first applies a thick layer of enamel and then removes it to let the central signs appear. « Painting must “remove”, it must erase any peripheral readings, exactly as I do through with my “erasing” technique, which is so important in my relationship to the history of painting. It consists in purifying, in reaching the “almost nothing”, the minimum », says the artist.

Loïc Le Groumellec’s painting is a painting without compromise. It is an obsessive work haunted by spirituality, religion, where forms refuse any psychological or narrative projection. They are represented for what they are in search for perfection and absolute.