David Hominal

L'Almanach 14 : David Hominal

Born in 1976 in France, lives and works in Amsterdam

David Hominal is known for his paintings soaked in blood and smoke made in the smoking room of the butchery of his father.
His work questions painting both formally, through the use of the particular medium, and historically, by exploring different genres. His almost performative paintings are characterized by a great physical presence, "a breeze of fury."¹
David Hominal states in an interview with Nicolas Trembley that along his path, "music was something dominant, a desire to understand the arrangements: construction and deconstruction, etc. Like poetry, sequences, words, breath, space, breaks in the sentence, rupture ... the kind of elastic space between the words that connects the whole."
And that is precisely what we find at Le Consortium, paintings of different sizes that are diagonally cut up by two different colors. Although they each have their autonomy, the artist uses his paintings as a unity, with which he can create rhythm.
Since 2009 he produces abstract works, using pennants represented in Renaissance paintings as his source of inspiration. The colors in these works also recall the flags used in the semaphore alphabet. These paintings are to be considered from a purely formalistic and pictorial point of view. Paint is applied in such a way as to let the trace of tools used to make it faintly appear, far from the perfect flat surfaces found in the abstract paintings of his Swiss colleagues.

This new series of paintings specifically made for the exhibition at Le Consortium are inscribed in the continuity of a work based on opposition, framing, and on a structure where the window comes back as a figure, a format and an outline, an architectural ghost. These paintings resonate with the architecture of the Consortium and the rhythm of the exhibition room. The rectangles drawn in charcoal onto the layers of paint echo the seven windows in the room that allow the works to be viewed in natural light.

 ¹ As quoted in an interview with Nicolas Trembley,  in "Versatile," Numéro, December 2010.