Michael Durantet the French based photographer and painter lives in a world where abstract is god.
Fusing inspirations as diverse as literature, music and philosophy, Michael Durantet encourages us to view, absorb and marvel at work that is visually profound.
Meta reality, time, surrealism and language are discovered and explored in the vivid and addictive worlds of Michael Durantet.
Explain your love affair with photography and painting?
I work in the space between painting and photography with real time and real axioms. I love the dilution of time in photography and in paintings. That transfiguration of real after clearing referents of each medium to create a new referent. Concrete portraits are real abstractions, with pieces an instant of other realities. It is the resolution of an equation in different terms floating inside the tension of the real and the regard.
Have you always been interested in the abstract and what inspired this love?
Abstract is the best way to talk about life and when you utilise photography then there is an immediacy an instant where reality lies. I am most interested in contemporary art, literature, philosophy, reading and painting which I have always loved. But really I have so many influences it’s hard to pin down. Some of my work references are great abstract painters like; Pollock, Soulages, Zao Wou Ki and Yves Klien. But I can also think of, Kerouac, Miro, George Condo, Lowry, Marx and Nietzche. It’s an accumulation of experiences in all senses and in all directions.
What are the challenges to the techniques you use in creating your work?
There are no challenges the only technique is how I personally articulate new language with grammar. However, there are complexities in the sense that my work is about language as the medium. That’s why two concepts are important to me; meta-reality and concrete abstraction.
The real technique is do what painters can’t do and do what photography never was.
What does ‘concrete abstraction’ mean to you?
It is the superposition of different realities; addition, subtraction, space, time, references and the deconstruction / reconstruction in a coherent abstract moment. These moments are integrated as such into a history of a photograph.
Looking at the evolution in your work there’s seem to be more technique and more depth of message-is this true and why?
I work hard to the point that there can be this confusion of sense. This evolution so to speak which has transformed my work is the articulation of elements in the way that constitutes a language. The instant of photography will never be later, so transfiguration, of real becomes fact. It is an axiom to articulate reality.
Talk us through your most recent work-we love Portrait Of An Anonymous.
I explore language and articulation of reality and of course art as a medium. Portrait Of An Anonymous deconstructs/destroys elements and instances of photography. It is a work of decomposition and transfiguration of the real. A re-composition is, in the same way a decomposition of image, time and reference of time. In another reality a concrete reality a concrete abstraction with codes of history of the painting, using codes of photography and portraits. It is an explosion of concrete and building new codes. These anonymous have no faces and no time because reality is deconstructed and the articulation is done about the notion of the alterity of the real-this is a Portrait Of An Anonymous.
Portrait of Antonin Artaud interesting elaborate more.
This work uses concrete instants of the real in order to show Antonin Artaud’s mental state. The description has in the text ‘l’osselet toxique’. The first time I read Artaud I found a brother and it seems so clear to me what he was striving to explain in his works.
What new pieces are you working on?
I am forever in the process of creation it is never ending. I am happiest when I am creating something absolutely new and never seen.