sylvain malfroy-camine at david klein birmingham

Scherzo

Nov 17, 2022

Scherzo features Malfroy-Camine’s most recent paintings on a grand scale, with a palette reminiscent of the Impressionists and Pointillists of the early 20th century. The work also reveals a relationship to Larry Poons’ colorfield paintings of the early 1960s with their painterly dots and ellipses.
The artist notes: “Scherzo is a kind of musical composition that also means ‘joke’ in Italian. In titling the show this way, I hope to imply music in the work shown, but also to lightly question the amusing notion of music’s relationship to painting, since paintings are notoriously silent.”

*Madame Bovary* oil, colored pencil on canvas (diptych) 72x120

Madame Bovary’s distinct sides are connected by dabs of paint that migrate from a brighter palette on the right to subdued on the left. A viewer becomes absorbed in this large-scale, seductive interpretation of a character’s tightrope walk between convention and freedom, sanity and madness.

Your prescription doesn’t need adjusting. Malfroy-Camine’s blurred composition is softer in the middle and deepens as it reaches the edges. Mark-making isn’t as liberal as the other pictures allowing this one’s buttery feel.

*Cauldron* oil, colored pencil 39 1/4 x 48

Cauldron organizes and defines shapes in a much sharper coloration. Evenly dispersed Poons-like marks seem to radiate from the center outward accompanied by a few energetic squiggles. Vibrato perhaps?

One of my favorite exercises to impose on unsuspecting students is to paint sound. It can be anything from contemporary music to a mosquito buzzing your ear on a hot summer evening. What does that sound look like? What color is it? Is it soft, sharp, annoying? Does it have a rhythm or is it random? These paintings illustrate variations in cadence from a light concerto to fully symphonic creating engaging abstractions that firmly hold a viewer’s attention.

“I make work improvisationally, allowing marks to build upon each other or fall into a din of chaos. I mix colors slowly on the palette, read the activity taking place in the painting, and deliberate my next moves as I decide where the painting ought to go. In this way, I don’t presuppose the painting, and allow it to move by some chance and by some choice, until it arrives into harbor, freshly painted, or dinged and dented…” –Sylvain Malfroy-Camine

On view through November 26th at David Klein Gallery 163 Townsend Birmingham

*images courtesy of David Klein Gallery