20°

The work by the Swiss artist Stéphane Dafflon is characterized by being conceived in relation and from the exhibition space. This permeability of the works with respect to the architecture of the place, together with the fact that they modify the spatial perception of
the viewer, moves Dafflon’s work away from formalism, despite sharing many features with the classical abstraction of the 20th Century.

The twenty degrees that give title to his individual exhibition in Parra & Romero correspond to the inclination that all the pieces have with respect to horizontal, and whose origin is the railing and access ramp to the gallery. From this architectural circumstance, Dafflon deploys a whole display of inclined canvases that, in addition, appear split to contain inside of them the openings of the walls, the doors and the columns. The pillar located in the main room also plays a role with regard to the articulation of the paintings, since it appears reflected in all of them in the form of a band with a darker color, as if it were a shadow projected in an impossible way. The pattern employed at the canvases provides a referential grid for the viewer to stay aware of the horizontal and vertical, with the lines being wider or thinner in each painting, as if the pattern was zoomed in and out. The line of the horizon is also remarked by a change of color in every painting at 140 cm from the floor: the height of the look and the height in which the paintings are conceived, before being twisted.

The exhibition as a whole plays with the ideas of repetition and variation, generating a visual rhythm from the imbrication between the architectural and the pictorial. Dafflon challenges the neutrality of the white cube by activating the exhibition space and the position of the spectator as agents participating in the work – or vice versa. The paintings are thus originated in the architectural environment and the precise occasion of the show
to become later autonomous artworks that could adaptate to different contexts.

Also the colors and motifs usually employed by the artist in his works connect them with other fields that go beyond pure art, expanding the fields of abstraction. These are simple and at the same time attractive and cheerful, appropriating the visual codes of industrial design, the composition of digital images made by computer and the appealing look of the mass media. Dafflon creates this kind of motives at his computer and then takes
them to the hand-work of painting, in an uthopic though fortunate attempt to make reality match the precision of mathematics.

Stéphane Dafflon (Neyruz, Switzerland, 1972) graduated from the ECAL (École cantonale d’art de Lausanne) in 1999, where he has been teaching since 2001. He has showed his work in solo exhibitions at Le Plateau – FRAC Île de France in Paris, Art Center of Fribourg, MAMCO of Geneva, FRAC Aquitaine in Bordeaux, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen and Villa Arson in Nice, among others. His work is part of collections such as Daimler Art Collection, Berlin and Stuttgart; Kunsthalle Weishaupt, Ulm; Arthotèque de Villeurbanne; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain – FNAC, Puteaux; FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Angoulême; FRAC Aquitaine, Bordeaux / frac Île-de-france, Paris; FRAC Franche-Comté, Besançon; FRAC Pays de la Loire, Carquefou;
Fonds cantonal d’art contemporain (FCAC), Geneva; Fonds d’art contemporain de Geneva (FMAC); Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; Kunsthaus Aarau, Switzerland.