Jean-Yves Drouineau

Jean-Yves Drouineau was born in Royan, France in 1962, He has raised in a small village within the Cognac area. When he was young he started to make sculptures using vines as well as painting. Growing up he studied science and later on literature and arts.

Around 20 years old he got in to screenwriting and movie direction but the painting was the most important. At the age of 29 he moved to Mexico where he still lived. For his 10th anniversary in Mexico he has had a retrospective exhibition in the Modern Art Museum in Mexico's state. Through numerous individual and collective exhibitions he has reached high recognition as well as several pieces in different Mexican museums.

After being figurative (flowers and seascapes) he has turned into abstraction, based on philosophy and Cézanne's sentence: «When color has its richness, form has its fullness.

ARTIST STATEMENT - by Gerardo Traeger M. (Art critic and curator)

Mexican naturalized artist, born in France in 1962, who has adopted our country as his battlefield. In fact, it is right to call it "Battlefield", because the artist here suffers, here he questions, rethinks, reinvents himself in which to make abstract of this Mexican French.

Artist of abstract monochromes, arising from an immediate, unconscious background, a kind of automatism without limits or concessions, then comes the reason and consciousness and on this first basis, begins a reflexive, controlled work, where abstraction and monochrome fully comply with the European positions of great abstract artists such as Nicolás de Stael, Hans Hartung or Pierre Soulages. It is undeniable that he inherits from these artists elegance, philosophical approaches, all the complexity of European abstraction. However, he assumes it, makes it his own and transforms it into something personal, that is, the philosophical, aesthetic or physical experience of his own.

It is important to insist on the origin or background of his work, it is practically Action Painting, total freedom, worked even with irreverent materials, soil that collects in the field, paper of different qualities, recycled and pasted as a collage that later he decides to take hand in hand to a more aesthetic and deeper destination, using the above as a basis to paint more formally, more controlled and monochrome oil.

Jean Yves is an avid reader of philosophy and in his painting all existential doubts of the artist are raised and discussed.

How much it resembles life, it does things in a first stage automatically, without awareness, without hesitation, without reflections, and then arrive at the moment of stopping, reviewing, rethinking, structuring, all that we did in total freedom. The painting by Jean Yves Drouineau is a metaphor for life. Its monochrome is a challenge, it is an attempt to say more with less, how far can we go with emotion, using only one color? The answer is in the form; the variety of tones, the textures, the brush, the spatula, the mathematical division of the canvas, the abstract geometry, realizing a kind of mosaic surfaces, through a great amount of transparencies and glazes, are precisely the elements that make A painting by Jean Yves Drouineau is full of knowledge and a virtuosity built through many intense years of work.