David Dupuis
February 9 - March 11, 2006
Opening reception: Thursday, February 9, 6-8pm
Derek Eller Gallery is pleased to present drawings by David Dupuis.
David Dupuis’ drawings are a distinct blend of diagrammatic abstraction and biomorphic psycho-narration. He creates ordered, crystalline world inhabited by forms of menacing beauty and incipient decay. Delicate figures balance precariously among undulating waves of color and monochromatic rainbows. Their seeming instability gives the work a quietly buzzing intensity.
Dupuis’ small drawings have been an ongoing activity. Many are completed in a day, but others are rediscovered and reworked over time. Dupuis says: “The small drawings are like art experiments… a search and destroy, search and recover… Most of the ideas in my work come out of these small drawings. I take an image or a motif out of one in order to make larger works. I have always thought of these works as collage without adhesive. I like working with concepts of collage… making stylistic shifts, with graphite, ink, color pencil… to make subtle and/or jarring visual poetic shifts.” New for this show is the addition of traditionally glued collage. Dupuis sifts through, what he terms, “the disposable photo clutter” of magazines, saving images or colors that break through for him.
Dupuis’ large works have undergone a noticeable shift. There are more overt landscapes that employ a looser drawing technique. Other larger works take more directly from him small drawings, combining his familiar repetitive use of graphite and color pencil , and his recent preoccupation with collage. The third shift developed from an experiment of his, in which he made a self-portrait a day, for a year. This exhibition includes three large works, that take Dupuis’ obsessive approach and apply it to portraiture. The grotesque nature of these images is a result of his amusement and frustration with this process.
Dupuis work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe. This will be his sixteenth solo exhibition.
Derek Eller Gallery is located at 615 West 27th Street, between 11th and 12th Avenues. Hours are Tuesday - Saturday from 11am - 6pm. For further information or visuals, please contact the gallery at 212.206.6411 or visit www.derekeller.com