Curated by:
Claudine Grammont
The exhibition brings together thirteen works from Noël Dolla’s latest Sniper series, created between 2020 and 2021 at the 109, a centre for contemporary art in Nice. In this new and vast studio, Dolla inaugurated a practice that allows him to work on very large formats, including canvases that are ten metres long.
His studio – a former slaughterhouse – is equipped with girders and block and tackle pulley systems that Dolla uses to be lifted in the air on a plastic stretcher. As he lies on it, he slides over the canvas installed on the ground, wrestling with the painting without touching nor seeing it.
A bottle of black acrylic in his hand, he first squeezes the paint onto the surface and traces a black line that structures the space of the composition. Sliding over the work a second time, he then applies different colours on the canvas, his body still uncomfortably hanging in the air and moved across the studio like a camera used for a tracking shot. His last move is a destructive one as he “fires” with the trivial weapon he has made for himself – an air pressure toilet plunger – on the patches of colored paint that burst through the white surface, bringing to mind the terrible image of a body hit by a bullet.
Appealing and terrifying « Flowers of evil » bloom all along the canvas. At first sight, they are charming but quickly take on a tragic aspect when one realises that they are all about war, death and torn shreds of flesh.
This series is redolent of Matisse’s large mural decoration La Danse which he designed in a former garage converted into a studio Rue Désiré Niel in Nice. He worked to scale and, like him, Dolla, engages in a hand-to-hand combat with painting. In both cases, the artist negotiates very large formats and creates “through” his performative body, carrying out a perilous exercise like a tightrope walker suspended in the air.
I first encountered painting through Matisse when I discovered his “Fauteuil Rocaille” here in Nice after the opening of the museum.
Noël Dolla
Watch the behind-the-scenes video of the installation of the exhibition
