Hervé Dubreil
Jazz

 

  

Fruit of a three years continuous work and of long hours of listening, this pictorial unit on jazz music only pretends to be purely emotional - and only that!

Indeed, it is not here question of the illustration of a musical topic, not more than of the portrait of the concerned musician.

The artist listens to the music, penetrates himself about it, impregnates himself some, and, plunged in this musical climate, he seeks to retransmit, on the chosen support, through colors and matter, by the means of the rhythms of the composition, the sensations and feelings in which the hearing of the musical piece has bathed him.

"The rhythmic section" 81 x 65*

 

"Round Midnight T. Monk" Dry Pastel - 63 x 48*

The Jazz, from Blues/Gospel to current designs, rich and varied, creative and spontaneous in its improvisations, offers to the painter a pallet of feelings, from the melancholy of the fascinating "Willow Weep For Me" by Stan Getz, to the jubilation of the extrovert "Song Sung Long" of Carla Bley.

The diversity of the compositions comes directly from that of the orchestras, passing by the solitary guitar of Lightnin' Hopkins to the score of instruments composing the orchestra of Count Basie.

The unit is completed by a study carried out on "Alone Together" by Chet Baker and its Quintet. The artist expresses in first his emotion caused by the listening of the topic, then considers the play of the musicians, devoting to each one a canvas. There again, it is a question of complicity between the painter and the musician, and not of representation of the interpreted chorus.

"As one looks at this pastels, as one reads the title of the compositions which have inspired them, music appears. All the sounding abstraction of music is here, materialized, fixed in the silences of a color which leads to the "arrangements" as Bill Evans would say, of all the vibrations that jazz is able to transmit : unique, strong, sensual." Robert Inard d'Argence - Nice Matin (september, 12th 1999).

"Here, the painter and the musician are in osmosis with Verlaine : « Music first of all». Hervé reinterprets for us what he hears, to emphasize it in power and force, as well by the tempo as by the sound, as well by atmosphere as by this color which the great ones give to this old incantation.
Are emotion and freedom really abstract concepts ? From dry pastels on paper to oil on canvas which get to warmness and to all the nuances of metal in fusion, this last word appeared to us the rightest to weld the harmony between jazz and Hervé Dubreil’s painting."
Robert Inard d'Argence - Nice Matin (december, 26th 1995).

The techniques used are:

Dry pastel on paper;
Oil-base paint on canvas

Composition:

25 oils on canvas from 15F (65/54) to 100P (162/114);
35 pastels (63/48), 6 pastels (48/33), 8 pastels (115/75)

... at the Vasarely Foundation exhibition.

  • * Photo Credit : P. J. Amar

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