STÉPHANE DUCRET | PAINTING NUMBER ONE, 2017

Private collection, Switzerland

One could call Stéphane Ducret’s work “appropriation art”. His paintings focus on painted portraits of other artists’ work, He emphasizes the spaces in which he places them in a kind of collage. This “recontextualization” confronts our prevailing ideas of art, taste and style. Ducret is as interested in the original process of creating a work of art, as he is in the context beyond the artist’s sphere of influence, in which the work is subsequently situated. His paintings allow multiple readings.They are filled with scholarly and personal references, which are treated in an evocative, allusive, ambiguous and metaphorical way.