Jazz, portraits clashés

Inspired by the energy of jazz and by both iconic and lesser-known photographs, Alain Dauchot seeks, through his drawings, to capture musicians in their moments of grace. Through his black-and-white portraits, he attempts to convey, visually, something of their aura and their mystery.

His paintings — created using a palette knife, acrylics and Indian ink — are, in a sense, attempts at communication and communion.

Self-taught, his style navigates between expressive sketching and sensitive portraiture.

‘My obsession with faces is like a common thread running through my artistic journey. I draw in a quest for “vibration”: to move beyond the figurative, to spill over into abstraction, to be somewhere between the surface of the paper being darkened and the deep soul of the subject I’m trying to sense and capture, between the desire to “represent” and the pure pleasure of drawing. A crossroads of intentions and ambitions never quite realised, so I have to go back to the drawing board every time!”

Exhibited as part of the Marni Jazz Festival, his portraits — described as ‘clashed’, as they are created in a highly impulsive manner — are first and foremost tributes to jazz artists and to music in general: the kind that transports us ‘elsewhere’.

Career

“I started drawing as a teenager, with comic strips; I then branched out into caricature and editorial illustration, and gradually began building up a gallery of portraits of musicians: rock at first, then blues, then jazz.” Still just an ‘amateur’, doing it for fun and out of passion! I took a beginner’s course in Japanese calligraphy and, for the past three years, I’ve been going once a week to Marcel Hastir’s studio (nude models)." A.D