Les 2 font la paire...! (a) - "They make a great pair!" (2025) Painting by Chamartin

Chamartin, Painting the experience of time

Chamartin's work reminds me of a piece of Baroque music: each time you listen to it again, you discover more nuances and new tones … As if each gaze traveled differently over the painted surface, as if another invitation allowed you another approach…

If we can describe Chamartin's painting as abstract (non-figurative would be more appropriate, as it abounds with vital energy), this also reveals itself in turn mineral, climatic, skeletal or epidermal. It is in fact through plastic work on the skin that the artist developed this aesthetic of the flow and the trace which is his. From scars to marks left by caresses and scratches, whether those of a body or those of time, the painter has thus endeavored to depict the epidermis as a surface of impregnation of lived experience, work that he continues today in more mineral compositions where the exteriority of the physical world and the interiority of the painter combine.

For several years, in the light of this interpretation, Chamartin's abstract paintings can be understood as interior landscapes. Unless they are the expression of a universal nature. In his geological forms that we would find in the trails of sediment on rocks or in certain fossilizations of corals, the artist thus seems to show their mental and spiritual equivalence. Inlays of tubular motifs and chromatic flows therefore populate the artist's latest compositions and seem to tell the story of the formation of the world. The pictorial time of these streaks or chips of paint as well as of these shapes whose imprint the paper seems to have preserved thus joins that of the biological and the mineral. As in nature, each work combines creative impulse and autonomous movement of a material in perpetual expansion.

It therefore seems that time is at the heart of Chamartin's work. That of painting of course, but also that of the man he shows with his skins and the skulls from the Family Portraits series, like that at work in nature. A work which also invites us to take the time for a contemplation which, beyond the visual experience, becomes inhabited and impregnated.

Bertrand Naivin (critique d' art)

• Nationality: FRANCE
• Date of birth : 1952
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary French Artists