My first is a landscape or an interior scene; my second, a screen or a flat that covers my third, which contradicts my first. Sampling gives its title to my whole.
If there is a game to which Dan Brault's painting could be compared, then perhaps it would be the charade or the rebus. This kind of combination of signs and figures, aggregated together, are clues to a story to be found. Yet here, instead of coherence, an investigation is established that never ends and never resolves itself. At the painter's table, and as if fallen from the poets' nest, truth curls and twists into a poem that perfumes and keeps us captive, at the very least, to a canvas with strange rays. It is the solstice of the painting which in the vapors of a too long night makes the flame of our expectations flicker in a derisory dance: that of pleasure, simple and honest.
According to the artist, the language of painting is too vast and too rich to master all its dialects and accents. The sheet of History weighs heavy, even on the strongest shoulders. Therefore it will not come to curl up in the bosom of tradition, nor to be a figure of knowledge: Dan Brault resists to the call of sense, just as much as to this form of politeness that would like us to behave properly. Dan Brault's stroke is freer than that, his references less expected and his manner, above all, far too nervous. There is no risk-free style, and this one does not care about the century's harmonies, but rather enjoys paradoxes and dissonances. Would a battery or a lamppost be worth less than a landscape or a History scene? Pixel or glaze, who will defeat the other? Images versus images for a new kind of tone on tone.
Between improvisation and mastery of composition, Dan Brault's singular little music fits seamlessly with everything that inspires him. By increasing the world through assemblages and remixes, the artist likes to go beyond the frame. Painting then imposes itself as the ultimate and impassable form of virtual reality, another possible universe built in the studio on the model of nature itself, where Dan Brault spends so much time sampling the world.
Thibault Bissirier, November 2019
