Rectagular sun 2023

oil on canvas 195 x 114 cm

With his hands behind his back, he calmly observes full of possibilities before committing. He thinks about processes. He is the point of reference in the series of works. Transformations are happening around him.

Working on a large canvas is an experience in itself, there is more space. The movements are bigger, the dance is more physical.

I wanted a full length character and give substance to a life-size posture anchored in the ground.

With the pelvis relaxed, he seems available. With a timeless look he appears in the moment, the simplest link between the past and the future.

The sun shines in his face. The shadows of the past dissolve behind him and flow down the back of his legs.

He is in a peaceful void. The other half of the canvas is free, there is space for another person.

Around him there is a yellow rectangular frame.

The seduction of knowing 2023

oil on canvas 195 x 114 cm

Starting with a photo of a young man sitting on a stool, dressed in a white pullover, looking hopefully towards the sky, I wanted to explore his feelings of that moment.

Basically, in my composition with sharp and graphic contours, my creature was sitting on a white board, as if he was going to fall or jump into the existential void.

After Rectangular sun, I found the result too fatalistic and I started to create a dynamic that would keep him in place.

To anchor him, I deconstructed the back of the character into a mustard-colored mass. Another upward dynamic in blue undulations gives him a verticality in motion.

The blue spiral reminded me of the serpent in the story of the fall of the Garden of Eden just before he tried to seduce Eve with the apple, the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge.

Thus, according to this story, by leaving the paradisiacal ideal, the dynamic of consciousness was born, the ability to interpret reality, to judge and to choose between good and evil in all human subjectivity, the source of negotiations and conflicts.

So the figuration of my subject evolved from an existential paralysis to a tumultuous dynamic of human disarray.

Autumn Pride 2023

colour  felt pen and oil on canvas 50 x 40 cm

With a natural obviousness, this profile interacts peacefully with its surroundings like the coming and going of the seasons. The name Autumn pride is probably by considering myself to be in the autumn of my life.

The subject is luminous, the surroundings darker, earthy. Harmony and contrast, seek a balance in motion.

Starting with a solid outline and a few graphic surfaces, I compose from moment to moment. By observing, I adapt, I ornament, I adorn. To different degrees, the process can evolve into abstraction to give shape to the dances in my head.

The dynamic of my approach is the result in itself, an unfinished composition. These works, where there was in the result no more path to explore, no longer exist, I throw them away.

The action and my reaction are the open figurations that I leave on the support, without conclusion.

The result is often an erasure of the solid benchmarks I had put in place. A perpetual process of starting over. A tender regression of the animal towards its nature.

Like the dynamics of seasons, changes come and go. We can welcome them and integrate them. We can ignore them.

Cleansing 2023

Purification   

The base is a photo of a young man, a ‘bad boy’, hugging himself, in reassuring self-satisfaction. An innocent image of sensuality and intimacy. He takes the time to feel his own body, a simple and positive physical approach to introspection.

The whole image has a dynamic of purification, one could imagine that he is under a flood of water.

The contrast of light and dark, the chiaroscuro, accentuates his sensuality against the dark background that could represent the uncontrollable dynamics of his unconscious.

My composition could also depict a vulnerable soldier holding his rifle close to him, abandoned in his questions about the possible meaning of his destructive and self-destructive impulses.

He gently embodies critical thinking and the desire for change, development for something better.

Sculpting 2023

2023 oil on canvas 55 x 46 cm

The five portraits are made from the same model or his mirror, like transformations, different interpretations of a solid outline, an archetype.

With Sculpting I questioned the difference between the inside and the outside, how our intimate references are formed during our childhood through our education and our societal and cultural environment.

In its psychological approach, this work represents for me a paternal authority figure, the archetype of a father who nurtures trust and guides personal development, A father who is committed in contrast to an absent father. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time provoking the other in order to have a limit through his opposition, externalizing an internal conflict.

The choice of colors is rather cold : blue, the color of reason and power, brown for earth or anchoring, black for austerity, a few touches of fuchsia for some liveliness and dirty white to stain innocence. Finally, there are many greyish shades by the mixture.

One psychologist saw in the portrait a resemblance to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, a nice compliment considering the effect I wanted to achieve : a work that gives reference points and sets limits, that invites structure.

Sanguine2023

oil on canvas 55 x 46 cm

Sanguine is the most academic work among the five profiles, the most accessible reference. In many of my works there is a cry, this one remains relatively silent.

It is inspired by the commitment and evident integration of the passionate individual in relation to social causes. I made it at the end of March 2023, already in terms of weather, the month with the most lightnings in more than 20 years, with several days of riots during the national mobilizations against the pension reform project and multiple public transport strikes. A global chaos that forced to remain composed.

Although the basic image is a profile of a man, I want to see a Marianne, revolutionary, in blue, white and red tones, an image of oppressed dignity, courage and heroism. The character stands up in all weathers.

The segment of the eye and the forehead in blood red, is particularly realistic.

I could imagine this composition with these colours on old banknotes. I could have listened to the song Paris brûle (Paris burns) by Mireille Mathieu while composing it.

Digestion 2023

2023 felt-tip pen, ink and oil on canvas 50 x 40 cm

The same exercise with the same model, this time with more visceral drives. I often have the desire to lose control, to let go of everything and bring out the beauty of an impulse, its power, its fragility, its difficulty. Sometimes I dirty, I erase, I scrape the painting with a knife until destruction.

This exercise in letting go, in wanting to show what we don’t necessarily want to see, is difficult, full of contradictions.

This process is meant to be cathartic and liberating. Creativity exploring the limits to reframe oneself.

The reading of the result is very variable and open-ended. How each individual deals with live by using his guts is very personal.

With the dirty colors, the chaotic composition, the image could refer to the nausea of excess, to historical associations with Roman decadence, to the fall of a civilization and regression to the animal state, or simply to the loss of reason in madness. There are many other possibilities left to look at it.

Fungus 2023

oil on canvas 50 x 40 cm

Fungus could be the figuration of a child who hides in the background, lost in his conception of love and his relationship with others. Scared, he searches a place, not exactly knowing how.

A confused image between figuration and abstraction, an organic mixture of dark earth and compost could represent the subterranean dynamics of a collective unconscious.

Colours dominate over shapes. The subject blends into its environment. The absence of contrasts blurs the boundaries.

With a more abstract vision, we can see a mushroom. This living species, once considered primitive, sometimes even degenerated, is dependent on a host.

Like undefined traces left in the earth, this work questions one’s own identity in relation to the other, between dependence or independence, fear of commitment or abandonment.

There are people who want to stand out individually, there are people who want to commit to being part of something bigger. Others just want to blend in.

Lots of possibilities for individual choices to make.

artistic approach

With tender anger, Daniel Derderian is in search of coherence between the social image and the particular sensation of being an individual, he creates dynamics between the surface and the bottom. By deconstructing formatted and idealized images, he explores the twists of the soul, the strength and vulnerability that we carry within us through our secrets. He composes unfinished portraits to preserve an open dynamic  (intrinsic to the work). By highlighting our particularities, our strangeness, he creates a world of diversity, colorful, exciting. His subjects present themselves in their intimacy, as hybrid creatures in a world situated between dream and reality.

Daniel Derderian draws his models from the seductive and artificial world of fashion. The contemporary painters, such as Egon Schiele for the form and tension of bodies and Francis Bacon for the twisting and distortion of reality, inspired him in particular. From his experience in the Netherlands, his classical references would be Rembrandt, for his luminous darkness, and certain Flemish Primitives, for their mystical strangeness.

Daniel Derderian works in a hurry, torn between the moral restraint of an adult and the limitless fantasy of a wild child. He proceeds by setting up first a solid outline with pencil, felt, brush, he continues then with knife, rag, finger, white spirit to add decoration or erase, sometimes until destruction. Between appearing and being, confused between different realities, he explores the boundaries between figuration and abstraction.

After creation, he describes his work to another person, his ‘spokesperson’, who gives it a name in English. A process of distancing and a first interpretation. Daniel Derderian is looking for a simple connection, a dynamic, a liberation, the emergence of small stories that come out of the unsaid. Each work is framed in the same way, like a corset.

bio

Daniel Derderian lives and works between Montreuil (Paris) and Ghent in Belgium. He was born in Marseille in 1962 to parents of Armenian origin. He is in the third generation after the genocide.
At the age of eleven, to avoid an inner explosion due to things in life that he cannot understand, he goes out into the street with a small table knife in his hand shouting his fury at not finding his place in the world. A shrink advised him to take a hobby and he took ballet lessons. Dance, cinema, reading, art and creativity became his engines of survival. He cultivates himself by skipping school.
At the age of fifteen and a half, he obtained his first contract as a professional ballet dancer and completed his training at the Rosella Hightower International Dance Center in Cannes.

As a teenager, he wears eye makeup and clothes that make people look back. This provocation excites him. He likes to call the other person back to his own standards.
Professionally, he continues to operate primarily on the seduction of his appearance. He begins at the age of 17 as a ballet dancer at the Ballet National de Marseille Roland Petit, then at the Het Nationaal Ballet in Amsterdam. Moving to Paris he works in the glittering world of show business and takes acting classes with Vera Goreva of the Stanislavsky Moscow Art Theatre.

In 1995, he sets up the theatre company Viande, together with his Flemish life friend. (etym. Vivenda: that which serves life) and wrote and directed three creations. It presents a universe where reality and illusion are constantly coming and going. The stage wings are removed.

In 2008, he gives up the stage and begins his work as a visual artist.
His early works are collages based on X-rays – clinical material that objectively shows the inside of a body. It explores its origins, cultural influences and daily life. He put his works in a shopping cart and entered a gallery in Marseille, which exhibited them solo the same year.
The following year, he created a collection of objects-sculptures, urban totems that he exhibited in the same gallery. He would later destroy much of this work.

In 2015, Daniel Derderian switched to drawing and mixed media on large sheets of paper. He created his first hybrid portraits, compositions in layers, from the skeleton to the skin. The following year, he transposed the same process with acrylic onto canvases and left his subjects isolated on a blank background.

In 2019, he felt ready to switch to oil painting and added backgrounds. Today, most of his work consists of portraits. His approach remains impulsive and his compulsive productivity has allowed him to produce more than a thousand paintings and drawings.

He is currently an artist-in-residence at Galerie Thomé in  Paris and at Artgallery Nobody&Friends in Antwerp, Belgium.
He is a member of La Condamine and the DF Art Project collective, which highlights Figurative Destructuralism.