Very happy that my article on the exhibition series by the French artist Dominique De Beir, Accroc et Caractère, regarder et découvrir à l’intérieur, has been published in the online magazine Point contemporain.

For more than 30 years, Dominique De Beir has been digging, making holes, hollowed-out dots, in relief, in all kinds of materials: archive paper, recycled paper, packaging cardboard and, more recently, insulating polystyrene. This radical gesture manifests “the affirmation of a lack, a caesura, a bodily presence that seeks to flush out the thickness of the material and refuses the opacity and smooth image of the world” [DDB, September 2023]. Recently, the artist embarked on a new and impressive cycle of six exhibitions in various French institutions under the generic title Accroc et Caractère, a hymn to worn and altered surfaces, between torture and ornament. With accroc, which can be translated as hook or tear, it’s about a small but significant break, with caractère, character or type, it’s more a matter of temperament but also, in a completely different context, an interest in writing and books.

Taken together, these exhibitions are not so much a retrospective as a form of revisiting a body of work that is extremely stratified in every sense of the word, and which since 1996 has in fact formed a continuous whole. For the artist, everything, and therefore her work, is of today. Revisiting her body of work is part of a constant quest for the unexpected, the coincidental and the unplanned, but also for questioning and using the results to build up or continue the work. This is the deployment of research that is at work here.

You can find the full text in French here.

The full English translation will be published on a later date.

Dominique De Beir, Sans fin mais pas sans début ( Accroc et Caractère 3), Avril 2023, vue d’ensemble, musée des beaux-arts de Caen, photographie Edith Doove