Artist Frédérique Domergue creates unusual work, in 2 dimensions, which lends both from sculpture by the contours, and from painting by the quest for the different shades provided by the oxidation of metal surfaces.
Sans Titre XIX (Oxidized zinc and bronze leaf on wood panelling, 2014)
Frédérique Domergue claims to be a “lover of the matter” : “very quickly, it became clear. I had to touch it, transform it, to see it evolve beneath my very own hands.” She creates “paintings” by covering pre-gouged out wooden boards with very fine sheets of metal to obtain a sculpture-like effect. A painstaking phase of oxidation and sanding down follows, “initially really aggressive, until it becomes a caress”, permitting her to then obtain different colour shades and textures that give warmth to the metal and an unexpected sensuality.
The artist has a predilection for bronze and zinc : “bronze because I get very “earthy” greenish grayish oxydations which really suit my paintings. And the zinc gives me the gradients of a stormy or brazen sky, like when the sky mixes with the sea.”
Her paintings, on the cusp between figurative and abstract, evoke landscapes sometimes peaceful, sometimes troubled like myriad reflections of her own feelings : “it’s the view of others which tells me what I want to convey, and which enlightens me re my emotions. What matters is that each piece has its own poetry, that’s the main thing.”
Frédérique Domergue lives and works in Lunel, in France. Self taught, growing up with her grand mother, a seamstress, who gave her an appreciation for different matter and her grand father, a painter between whom she says “she began to put her arsenal together”. This dynamic duo is today translated in her artistic work by a search for duality and contrast : “I think I try to conjugate the soft and light side of dressmaking with the strength of the matter”. Above all, this early training, like a cross between fine arts and applied arts, provided her with a freedom of expression that goes beyond the confines of different disciplines. Her experiments associating different matter initially led her to explore a very functional register while relentlessly trying to express “a form of poetry” and adding “extra soul” to the art furniture which left her workshop. It is this research that today has her vested in an artistic approach.
