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“Economy of means gives to new forms,stimulates creativity,and is the source of style”
BRAQUE
Brief Commentary by a Colleague.
What Dussàn depicts of the human spirit is frequently grotesque.His figures writhe,animated by a mixture of pain, impulse, and sheer confusion. They seem to be struggling to awaken from a nightmare or striving to recover something of their lost human form. But the fluidity whit which they are rendered liberates the figures from their weight and semi-paralysis and gives them an ironic lightness and grace, sometimes an evanescence .He succeeds at this because he plays his strong suit well. His paintings derive their power the immediacy and spontaneity of his drawing. This is what gives them their life. His line is always subtly significant, full of poetic ambiguity and the more so when the background is pregnant with organics forms.
He never makes the mistake of attempting to marry his line with his color in strict or close correspondences between a color and a thing .But because of its movements his line dances with his color-and so the correspondences arise of themselves in the eye of the beholder-small synchronicities that flesh out the image in singular fashion for each contemplative viewer.
Nowadays, in the midst of so much conceptual art and so many installations, when skilful and sensitive drawing is once again so often relegated to merely ”academic ”if not “commercial” status, it is refreshing to see a colleague forging his style in the ancient language of the body in paintings which, since they are aimed at the heart, must come from the heart.
To base one’s painting on one’s drawing is, of course, a traditional approach but like these other artist(Rico Lebrun, Hyman Bloom, Mauricio Lasansky, Leonard Baskin and others), Dussan is a not artistically atavistic or nostalgic about representational art but instead is thoroughly versed in the lessons of modern art and its points of transformation. Look at Cubism, for instance, as another way of seeing, a break with the visual convention of one point Renaissance perspective.Cubism is ,in this sense of “new forms given”, a sort of classicism of the modern movement, and Dussan, I would say, is one of its linear descendents. After all, it is his deft use of superimposition and simultaneity of image, with an incisive line sometimes charged, like a lighting bolt , which makes them moving pictures. By the way, it turns out hat he’s never seen works by any of the painters I mentioned. No wonder the debt seemed so subtle, so well taken!
TIM HALL Artist.
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