Dimitry Orlac

Dimitry Orlac was born in 1956 in Slovenia. He has been living in France since the age of three. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne before continuing his studies at the École supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux. After getting his start with expressionist inks that familiarized him with gesture and materiality, Orlac explored geometric abstraction and started to challenge paint as a medium a priori essential to painting. These reflections led him in two distinct directions: installations made of neon lights, begun in the 1980s -such as the notable contribution to the Toulouse metro -, and canvases covered with layers of pur graphite since 1992, on paper mounted on canvas, first, then directly on canvas.

The Tableaux/Graphites -each of which requires five to eight months of daily work- is considered by Orlac as a life program. Unlike his friend Roman Opalka, for whom a painting is an element of a linear series and the expression of an irrevocable moment in time, Orlac sees each tableau as a whole. Its time is the time of being. It is a place where we are confronted with the serene presence of being in the world. And, according to Orlac, the tableau is the only object to have this quality. It is the place where humans, confronted with beauty, can freely both recharge and think about oneself.