Lebanon - Belgium - Art & Culture - Dufoor Blossomed
Nishee
Helen Khal
Special to The Daily Star
Frederic Dufoor, the Belgian painter exhibiting at Galerie Epreuve
d’Artiste, is someone who has traveled full circle in the evolution of
his art. Looking at the ordered elegance of his hyper-realist paintings
today, one would never imagine that he once was an impulsive
expressionist with a strong attraction to violent colors.
Artists may be born, but they do not blossom overnight. Except for the
rare genius of precocious talent, most of them spend years learning the
language of visual expression before they can formulate an individual
vocabulary of style. They then usually go through further years of
refining that knowledge before they reach the holy grail of authentic
maturity that is their goal.
Many artists, once they have established a style, stay with it. They may
apply it in a variety of media, but always it will remain as exclusively
recognizable as a signature. Others, provoked by emotional determinants
or chance influences, will make a dramatic move from one style to
another. Sometimes the shift pays off; and sometimes it does not.
For Dufoor, it did. As a student, he followed the academic route,
studiously drawing from the model day after day and learning all the
early modern traditions of figurative painting. During the 1960s, while
young and adventurous, he turned away from realism and succumbed to the
overpowering influence of abstract expressionism that postwar American
style of painting that swept across the world to become one of the most
universally viable art styles ever conceived.
Dufoor’s foray into vigorous abstraction and fauvist color, however, was
short-lived. By 1970, he had dispensed with color completely and was
working only in black and white. It was as though he needed to clear his
vision of all borrowed baggage and zero in on what he really wanted his
paintings to say and how he would go about saying it.
At this point in his evolution, Dufoor arrived at two important truths:
First, that realism, or what is called “new figuration,” was essential
to his artistic purpose; and second, that the only pictorial element
which had resisted abstraction and which would remain as a constant in
all his work from then on was his intuitive articulation of diagonal and
triangular directions in the compositional design of each picture.
Dufoor’s return to realism began with the awareness that he needed to
fully understand the object or person portrayed not to be able to
paint it better, but to discover its essence. He began to look around at
his surroundings with an intimate, microscopic eye. And as he began to
explore all the myriad complexities contained within reality, he knew
that to capture the truth he was looking for, he would need to re-train
his hand and re-educate his eye.
With “primitive Belgian patience,” he spent the next several years
studying the old masters and their techniques experimenting with
grinding his own colors, exploring all the tools and media of classical
art, deciding on whether he should paint in oil or wax or tempera, on
wood or canvas. And all the while, as he closely examined every detail
of the physical world around him, he began to absorb the cosmic
relationship of each part to the whole.
The eight large canvases now hanging at Epreuve d’Artiste provide superb
evidence of how well Dufoor has honed his skills. The images do not in
any way appear painted, but evoke instead an epidermal patina of
surfaces flawlessly rendered. He chose to paint in tempera, the
egg-based pigment used for centuries throughout the classical age, which
allows for much finer precision in brushwork than does the oil medium.
Since 1978, Dufoor has been working continuously on two themes the
human figure and the still life, both painted within the private
confines of his atelier. He focuses on the jumbled tools of his
profession the brushes and pencils, the pots and jars of pigment, the
paint-spattered table and easel, the scraps of paper, the spent snubs of
crayon, even pieces of string and discarded rubber bands then
contrasts their ordinariness against the more provocative presence of
well-thumbed books and the soft, smooth polish of a violin, a lute and
a flute, or against the sunlit peach-bloom flesh of a reclining nude.
He paints them all with equal love. In his portrayal of the female body,
however, one senses a curious reserve of emotion, an unpenetrated
barrier of understanding. It may be that he understands the “flesh” of a
paint brush or violin or any other object more than he does that of a
woman.
Dufoor is an intimist, who paints the details of his immediate
environment bathed in a quiet, introspective light, but with the
meticulous exactitude of Ingres. In the process, he transforms the
inanimate into a nostalgic hyper-realism of startling human content.