Personal Fragrance
Dominique Dupray –
Contemporary artist,
composer and painter in Normandy
Dominique Dupray is a French multidisciplinary artist, composer of contemporary atonal music, and painter, who has lived in Seine-Maritime since 2013. For over forty years, he has been developing a unique body of work in which musical composition and visual art engage in a dialogue.
A self-taught composer, he has been writing since 1980. Influenced by 19th-century German Romanticism, particularly Richard Wagner, as well as by the harmonic world of Richard Strauss (especially the Four Last Songs), he has gradually oriented his work towards atonal composition. His catalog includes several operas, such as *Les Derniers Mots d'une Pensée* and *Les Fleurs et la boue*, as well as several oratorios. Part of it was conducted by him in Paris in 1999.
His first opera, L’Infini couleur (Infinite Color), features a painter devastated by a sense of failure, haunted by the impossibility of realizing his masterpiece—a dreamlike canvas, “Infinite Color.” This lyrical drama explores the inner workings of creation: desire, frustration, fantasy, and inner struggle. A spell transports the painter to the heart of a blank canvas where the long-imagined work takes shape; he must then confront his own resistance to bring it to fruition.
Thirty years later, Dominique Dupray himself took up the brushes. This transition from musical composition to painting seems to extend, into reality, the foundational fiction of his first opera. As if the canvas imagined in the music had finally demanded its concrete existence.
In 2008, his work Les Éléments was performed at L’Espace Saint-Martin, affirming his commitment to demanding and independent musical creation. In 2011, he opened a second field of exploration: photography and photographic painting as a development. Then, in 2014, Dominique Dupray turned to painting and, favoring large-scale formats, summons animals, cities, and narrative situations into his pictorial universe, structured by a dynamic geometry inspired by Futurism and Cubism.
His artistic approach is based on a constant search for rhythm and formal aesthetics. Lines act like musical staves; curves become visual legato. In his paintings as in his musical scores, composition organizes tensions, silences, bursts of energy, and moments of respite. Music nourishes painting; painting extends music.
In Seine-Maritime, the artist presents his work in a permanent exhibition space housed in a former shop with a large storefront window. The studio, located adjacent to this space, allows for direct immersion in his creative world.
Between contemporary music and geometric figurative painting, Dominique Dupray constructs a coherent, independent body of work, where rhythm forms the profound link between the arts.
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