Damien Mazières at CAPC Bordeaux: Painting as Plural Territory

From May 15 to September 1, 2002, the CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain in Bordeaux presented an exhibition of works by French painter Damien Mazières. Mazières paints from photographs—parking lots, buildings, bus interiors, conference room furniture, TGV bars—deliberately avoiding singularity. His approach reinvests in a broadened pictorial practice influenced by Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and Malcolm Morley. He acknowledges major modernist milestones while engaging contemporary experiments, balancing real and imaginary, historical and anecdotal, actual and virtual. His methods include montage, composition, grid systems, controlled execution with chance, flatness, thin supports (foam board, wood panel, enamel), and monochrome (fluorescent colors). He transforms walls into paintings, combines abstraction and figuration, and uses fictional forms without narrative. For Mazières, painting is not just a space for storing rules and genres but a site for displacement and drift. He embraces the exercise of the image, tying together tension devices and representation principles, aware that a ludic and risky opening is necessary against the proliferation of insignificant imagery. The exhibition was accompanied by a text by Didier Arnaudet. Mazières was scheduled to exhibit later that year at the Carré – Musée Bonnat in Bayonne.