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The sort of painting that cannot but seize you.

That takes you away to a suggested material or spiritual place.

Thanks to movement first: it is unhindered and opens up fanciful worlds in which your mind is free to wander about - as in a dream, a nightmare or a fantasy. Idealized and mastered by the ideogram which works as a cross between landscape and pure meaning.

Thanks to colour and matter, too: the impact of red against black could be either violence or thought brought to burning point. The polychrome kindles the mystery of representation. The cerulean blues entice you to fly away or to meditate. There is also suggestiveness in the matter applied in a thin film here, a thick layer there.

One would be tempted to call it “free oneiric figuration”.

Anne-Lise CARRIERE, Humanities teacher.

 

 

For Dominique ANDREY, the most stable things, such as mountains and age-old citadels, come into movement, in the physical stages of a writing process that signifies them and sometimes, generates ideogram, as is the case with the Besançon fortress that the painter never tires of watching. “A Book of Hours” displaying the emblems of seasons and the houses of the day; a world rises from colour, materializes through it, conjures up swimming-pool-clear mornings, launches yellow rockets, glows like fire or blood against a sooty background, composes a rhapsody of blue. No doubt, colour and shapes rival. And if the former deserves all our attention, the latter is all important, too, for they are allied rivals, stimulating each other in the fusion of each individual painting. Each one bears a unique testimony to an original pictorial meditation, to its energetic experience and to the risks run by the artist whose thirst can only be quenched by never ending renewal.

André UGHETTO, Teacher and Poet.

 

 

The painting is strong, the colours are warm. In ANDREY's works one can feel an emotion that comes from deep down. Some paintings may remind one of rupestrian paintings because of the simple stroke that makes for powerful art, like enormous symbols that aim to make one go back to the beginning of time. On the other hand, other oneiric works convey a sturdy sensitivity whose strength and fantasy rival in lighter touches. The painting is courageous and daring. It expresses an interiority both dynamic and magnificent that surface in smooth ripples and are reminiscent of change, of metanoia. The artist strives to translate the world into clashing absence and presence, into a questioning where chaos and a yearning for intensity compete. A creative duality which cannot leave the viewer indifferent.

 

 

The works of Dominique ANDREYare given rhythm to by a cycle of the artist's emblematic colours (the range of blues, whites, reds and blacks highlighted by the use of sharp contrasts and play of light) and his further exploration of a given style or technique, alternating or superimposing.

The same subject - the Besançon Citadelle, for instance – becomes a playful pretext to a stylistic exploration which succeeds in creating radically contrasting atmospheres, shifting ever so lightly from almost figurative painting to a search for shapes so bald, abstract and minimalist that they come very close to the spirit of Chinese calligraphy. The ideogram “cycle” that results from it comprises Danse, Fleurs dans un vase, Céladon, Composition …

The artist enjoys playing with light and textures and when the application of colour turns rough, such energy, such tension and such urgency-laden movement arise that you are led to feel somewhat troubled, as in Paysage , le Pêcheur au filet or Ailes Noires .

Conversely, in other paintings such as Le Qi, Brumes and Citadelle (blue and white), the application of colour which is lighter, more diffuse and blurred (close to the style of Monet's Waterlilies in Brumes ) creates a serene atmosphere, a soothed one in comparison with other works.

The use of warm colours is particularly forceful and endearing in the lush fiery effect of the hills around the Citadelle in autumn…

The plays of light and reflection are brilliantly used in Le Soleil, endowing the diptych with balance and power.

This pictorial register brimming with energy, depth and vital thrust is undoubtedly what appeals to me in Dominique ANDREY's works.