Oil on canvas, 89×116 cm
Original artwork, 2300 €
THE SOUND OF SILENCE
“In his studio, Charles Ducroux travels. The echoes of music, in his space, mingle with fleeting images from the street. It is from these two sources that he gradually builds his work. A subtle nostalgia emanates from each of his paintings, where browns and grays dominate. Silent presences move through them, like figures on a train platform or a sidewalk in a city that could be ours. His images are imbued with a unique magic, an enigmatic gravity. They compel the viewer to pause, to take a moment. One wanders, drifts in a half-vaporous, boundless space. The visions we receive are somewhat like mirages, as if their very substance vibrates beneath a light veil of warmth. These are not portraits but sequences of life. Charles Ducroux’s passersby mysteriously move us. We hesitate to look away, for fear they might have left the canvas to go their way, without the slightest glance back at us.
A palette oscillating between grays and browns, a painting that could be read like a sort of modern novel—this is how Charles DUCROUX’s work appears to us, inspired by the figures one encounters by chance in the streets of New York or Nashville; here a woman and a child; elsewhere a man alone in Chicago.
What might their everyday life, their daily reality, look like? No one knows, not even the painter, who overlooks none of the setting in which these antiheroes evolve (cafes, avenues, industrial architecture, locations sometimes imbued with a welcoming coldness). He has simply captured a moment, a fleeting sequence of their lives. A moment charged with mystery and indescribable emotion. Like them, he sees himself as passing through, as in fact we all are, including those who pretend to believe they control the world. Inexorable time is indifferent to our actions. One senses in Charles DUCROUX a great interest in people, as if he could guess their reason for being and hoping. The sober titles reveal nothing of the circumstances that caught the painter’s eye, as if any commentary would violate the intimacy of his characters, captured without premeditation.”
-Luis Porquet, art critic