Frédérique

Domergue

Frédérique Domergue (1963) is into metal. She investigates all this material’s diversity to create a wide range of colours and textures. Her challenge is to alter its state: releasing the metal from the coldness and the brutality usually associated with it. Through polishing and oxidation, she gives it a warmth, softness and sensuality that makes you want to caress the radiant and silky oxidised surfaces of her paintings.

As metallic sheen changes, her artworks are often continuously evolving, witness to time passing. In the manner, the artwork’s oxidation transforms it bit by bit, as if alive. Frédérique Domergue gets her inspiration from nature and the seaside. Her paintings evoke landscapes, skies and seas that are sometimes calm and tranquil other times stormy, dark and ablaze. The horizontal line in many of her compositions is where land, sea and sky mix and mingle, the very place where the elements fuse.

Growing up with her grandparents, a painter and a dressmaker, Frédérique Domergue developed a taste early on for working with materials and their relation to experimental processes. This is what first led her to furniture design (wood and metal-framed). This mainly experimental practice allowed her to develop an intimate knowledge of a wide variety of metals: bronze, zinc, pewter, titanium, steel… Her passion and meticulousness of the finishing touches gradually drew her towards an essentially artistic approach. Freed from the practical aspect, Frédérique Domergue now creates paintings where her technical skills and artistic creativity are clearly expressed.