David POEY

David POEY or "Dav", paintings.

Dav graduated from the Reims Higher School of Art and Design and only took up painting afterwards, when his printer broke down...

The world moves fast, very fast. To be honest, we see very little of it. Dav strays off the beaten path, focusing on seemingly insignificant details that mean everything, mixing them up and sending them back to us as question marks. Naïve, absurd or cynical? Atypical for sure: the painting of this young artist is an unusual combination of figurative, abstract and narrative elements. The recurring characters in his work seem to have escaped from an unlikely comic book where the innocent and dream-like world of children collides with the oh-so rational reality of the adult universe. His free application of matter adds structure to the artistic medium, always creating a unique scene - a dialogue of shapes, colours and techniques. The narration, through the almost systematic addition of captions and written clues, serves as a link to the image, enabling numerous interpretations. Rich in wordplay, Dav's comments and aphorisms show us the extent to which language imagines and turns the world into words, frees it and imprisons it. These texts, throughout all the artist's paintings, drawings and graphical works, form a literary corpus with a philosophy similar to that of Picabia, Cioran or Debord.

The coexistence of all these elements on a single surface produces a multitude of possible meanings, enabling each viewer to confusedly add their own experience to this approach. Here, every discovery is a starting point.

Dav plays with whatever he finds at hand, or in his head: words, objects and beings. In a world that we share with him, all of this is mixed up and arranged in the semantic odds and ends of his workshop. A laboratory of human complexity, Dav's painting is neither sad nor joyous: it moves us in a most peculiar fashion, with humour and poetry, for better or worse.