Charles Ducroux

Charles Ducroux

Works of the artist

Charles Ducroux

Biography

“The voice of the unspeakable”

The voice of the inexpressible In his studio, Charles Ducroux travels. The echoes of music, at his place, mingle with the fleeting images of the street. It is from these two sources that he builds his work step by step. To speak of the work of a painter is to try to provide the reader with a few keys. A painting, by nature, is silent. She brandished no speech. His message is elsewhere. Its strength lies first in its power of evocation. Charles Ducroux understood this very well. What he shows us is not anecdote. We suddenly come close to lives, anonymous destinies, as if we overheard some intimate conversation. An intangible nostalgia is born from each of his paintings where browns and grays dominate. Willingness to erase? Modesty ? Perhaps there would be a little of that in our painter. Faced with his characters, I found myself thinking of the poet Fernando Pessoa, who liked to hide under a large number of pseudonyms. Haunted by a certain melancholy and this impression of loneliness which is the fact of life itself, Charles Ducroux’s canvases are almost always mixed. Silent presences pass through them, as on the platform of a station or the sidewalk of a city that could be ours. His paintings are imbued with a singular magic, of an enigmatic gravity. They force the spectator to stop, to take a break. Does naming places reduce its mystery?

At Charles Ducroux’s, we wander, we wander in a half-vaporous space, without limits. The visions we receive look a bit like mirages, as if their very material vibrated under a light veil of heat. These are not portraits, but sequences of life. Passers-by of Charles Ducroux mysteriously move us. We dare not look away, lest they left the canvas to go their way, without the slightest glance at us.

Luis Porquet, art critic, April 2010