MEET THE ARTIST
by Stephanie Grilli - NY Times art cirtic
Oscar Wilde’s self-defining maxim was turned into a rebellious anthem by the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Both the witty esthete and the rock powerhouse celebrate those imaginative individualists who elevate the human condition by aspiring to something beyond the ordinary. This creed characterizes the life and work of Denis De Gloire, who speaks of an unhappy childhood that caused him to dream of becoming a star — in this instance an earthbound star like those in film, music, and art. His earnest collages of screen icons like Marilyn and Belmondo as well as the legendary Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock are almost a kind of art manifesto in attaching himself to those larger-than-life inspirations who command attention.
The offspring of a house painter and a paint store owner, De Gloire at the age of ten saw a reproduction of a Pollock, and the action painter’s drippings were mind-blowing. All the more charged by paternal derision, this was a revelatory moment for which the boy was long primed. Later working with his father, he used the same medium but applied uniformly to walls and ceilings. He understood these innovative works in a way even an art professional might not, and yet the liberated use of pigment was so excitingly different from his day-in-day-out world. A revolution in art history sparked a personal one, and De Gloire kept Pollock in his sights.
His initial trajectory as an artist wasn’t like being shot out of a cannon as you might expect. Shunning art school, he opted for the military and then the boxing arena. Between the two endeavors, De Gloire started painting and drawing but subsequently destroyed those works, and it wasn’t until he closed his boxing club that he became a painter without reservation. His early career choices suggest a man who meets the world full-on, and he approached his canvases with an almost compulsive need for impact. From the onset, painting exhibited a bravura and explosive intensity like something contained that has been released.
De Gloire is a master of effect. As a goldsmith works with their precious metal, he works with the most high-grade materials and gives shape to them, based on the painter’s know-how and what he can bring forth. Given his sensibility, his expression is direct and high-energy — right between the eyes — but this is expressed by deftly exploiting his pigments while maintaining his respect for them. The immediate impact comes from colors in which De Gloire employs each to its glory. Running the spectrum, rich, saturated hues are laid down or boldly applied on prepared canvases in which geometry, dripping, or action is the form they seek. On the surface, these modalities may not seem consistent, until one recognizes how this is De Gloire taking his paints through their paces. He is attuned to the physical properties and behavior of a specific substance, so that it can be untethered.
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Not one to become part of a flock, De Gloire has never been concerned with what a contemporary artist is supposed to do, working in various styles being one of the ignored critical dictates. Perhaps his most audacious move has been adapting Pollock’s technique to his own purpose, an act which remains a sacrosanct hands-off in the artworld. Yet De Gloire exhibited his monumental series Four Seasons in the Bruges Belfry Tower, with an unassuming swagger that challenged anyone to tell him otherwise. He is a bit of a rogue. This unmitigated attitude is embodied in the paintings themselves, which have a magnetic charm or charisma. This quality is associated with confidence to the point of assertiveness and a seductiveness, and a De Gloire painting almost dares you to ignore it.
Most of them contain visual “force fields,” which, in turn, pull you in. Whether aggregating, weaving, or arrayed in luminous patterns, the painted elements appear to operate by some system of attraction or reciprocal action. Many of De Gloire’s compositions have a centrality or beckoning density that is irresistible. He describes his canvases as an arena, and this component is not simply a surface or a boundary. The paintings in which part of the canvas is left untouched suggest a void. Alternatively when filled to excess, there is an artistic quality called horror vacui or “fear of emptiness; but perhaps in this instance, the principle aligns with its origin in the concept that “nature abhors a vacuum” or Natura abhorret vacuum. Certainly this is most evident in his drip paintings, but there is always the sense that the color may encroach upon, travel through, or overwhelm a limitless void. Splatters extending outward from fevered applications of paint make it seem like De Gloire is mapping a sun. No matter the style or technique, he uses high chroma — a color’s purity and brightness — to create movement and light, as if he were borrowing from the playbook of cosmic phenomena. Who is to say that the stars a dreamer looks to can’t be ones of his own making?