Philippe Decrauzat’s works set walls atremble, hollow out and stretch space, throw the body and eye off balance. Through clever plays of perspective, the artist seeks to shake up our visual certainties. With his geometrical compositions, he makes light work of reality and provokes spectacular optical effects.

To get what he is after, Decrauzat may modify and cut up the frame of a canvas, as in Luh, whose wavy contours closely follow the lines of the composition in order to heighten the impression of visual torquing. Luh alludes to a character brought to life in a novel by the English science-fiction writer J. G. Ballard; the person has the ability to produce distortions of sound, and it is those distortions that Decrauzat seeks to translate here through pictorial means. Indeed, sound and images from musical pieces regularly appear in the artist’s work.

The painting Five star (oil on canvas) depicts a star in perpetual motion that looks as if it yearns to fly from the wall and whose twinkling flashes flit about according to pulses of light. A flower that has burst apart, a spark from the Big Bang, a lost pulsar, Five star functions like a delicate stroboscope whose optical spasms serve no other purpose than to gently hypnotise us through their irregular rhythm and play of reflections.

A painter of movement and fluctuations, Philippe Decrauzat offers us works that exist as visual phenomena to be experienced. By turns blinding and magnetic, they only seek to fool our senses, all the more to delight us.