Fragrance of Thought
Sometimes, certain works are born long before they appear. They traverse the years, change form, and move from one medium to another.
This notebook gathers fragments of thought, correspondences between music and painting, notes on writing, and traces left by works in progress.
Here, one sometimes encounters an opera awaited for thirty years, an aphorism transformed into an image, or a color emerging from a musical phrase.
Nothing is finished here. Only fragments.
1. From opera to painting: how “L’Infini couleur” preceded the paintings of Dominique Dupray
1. From opera to painting: how “L’Infini couleur” preceded the paintings of Dominique Dupray
In 1982, Dominique Dupray began composing. A self-taught musician influenced by German Romanticism and French Symbolism, he gradually developed a personal musical language, oriented towards contemporary atonal music.
His first opera, L’Infini couleur (Infinite Color), tells the story of a painter devastated by a sense of failure. Unable to realize his masterpiece—a dreamlike canvas he calls “Infinite Color”—he sinks into doubt and frustration. The opera explores the inner workings of creation: desire, inner struggle, and the fear of not living up to his own vision.
A sudden enchantment transports him to a blank canvas where the long-imagined work takes shape. He will have to confront his own resistance to bring it to life.
At the time, Dominique Dupray was not a painter.
Yet, nearly thirty years later, in 2011, he picked up a paintbrush.
This transition from music to painting is not a rupture. Rather, it appears as a natural extension. Lines become visible. Rhythms are inscribed in space. Curves unfold like legato. The canvas, once imagined within the realm of lyrical fiction, becomes a real territory for exploration.
Today in Seine-Maritime, Dominique Dupray develops a structured pictorial oeuvre, often large-scale, where geometry organizes tension and movement. Animals, cities, and situations take their place in compositions constructed like musical scores.
One could say that painting has come to answer a question posed in music thirty years earlier.
Infinite Color was perhaps not merely a fictional work.
It already foreshadowed a shift, a transformation.
Creation never disappears; it simply changes its medium.
2. Contemporary Music and Geometric Painting: The Visible Rhythm of Dominique Dupray
For Dominique Dupray, a contemporary music composer based in Normandy, painting is not a secondary practice: it is an extension of musical language.
His canvases reveal the tensions that his music creates: line, rhythm, architecture.
As in "Missed Encounter," where a stylized city unfolds in angular planes and abrupt perspectives, the buildings seem to tilt, the facades are delineated into geometric masses of dark green, midnight blue, and sea green. Orange circles appear like accent points—almost percussive strikes in the pictorial space. The light does not caress: it cuts. The diagonals function like sonic attacks.
This organization recalls atonal writing: no stable center, but organized tensions. The flat areas of color act like blocks of sound. The white verticals at the center of the composition could be compared to an orchestral ascent, a continuous thrust.
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In "Mermaid in Metamorphosis," for example, the rhythm becomes more organic. Forms intersect, interlock, and overlap. Stylized bodies, architectural fragments, and graphic elements seem caught in a swirling motion. The colors—deep pink, turquoise, acid green, and bright orange—create dynamic contrasts akin to musical counterpoint.
Here, geometry is not cold. It pulsates.
Diagonals act like melodic lines. Repetitions of circular motifs evoke rhythmic cells. Colored voids function as structuring silences. As in a contemporary score, the tension does not seek classical resolution: it maintains balance within instability.
These paintings reveal the influence of Futurism and Cubism: fragmentation, multiple viewpoints, and a sensation of movement. But in Dominique's work, this fragmentation is always organized by a musical logic.
His paintings read almost like visual scores.
The lines are reminiscent of musical staves.
The curves evoke legato.
The flat areas function like orchestral masses.
The city becomes a chord.
The body becomes a sentence.
Color becomes timbre.
Since 1982, Dominique Dupray has composed contemporary atonal music marked by a search for rhythm and an expressive tension inherited from German Romanticism. In 2011, when he took up painting, he didn't change his language: he changed his medium.
In Seine-Maritime, in his permanent exhibition space, the continuity is evident: musical scores and canvases extend the same formal exploration.
Between contemporary music and figurative geometric painting, it is not a dialogue between two art forms, but a single, flowing thought.
Sound becomes color.
Color becomes rhythm.
What is contemporary atonal music ?
(and how does contemporary composer Dominique Dupray approach it ?)
Contemporary atonal music is often perceived as complex, even confusing. Yet, it rests on a clear intention: to break free from the traditional tonal system in order to explore other forms of sonic organization.
In classical tonal music, works are structured around a stable harmonic center (a key). Musical tensions generally seek resolution. Contemporary atonal music, however, is no longer organized around a single center. It explores unstable balances, prolonged tensions, and contrasts of timbre and rhythm.
Another Way of Organizing Sound
Being a contemporary composer in the atonal field does not mean abandoning structure. On the contrary: architecture becomes even more essential. The fundamental elements are rhythm, orchestral color, and sonic density with its contrasts and silences.
In this type of writing, silence is not an absence; it is a breath. Tension does not necessarily seek resolution; it creates a space for listening.
The Contemporary Atonal Music of Dominique Dupray
Dominique has developed a personal style of writing. Gradually, his musical language has evolved towards atonal contemporary music where the melodic line becomes tension, sonic masses structure the space, and emotion is conveyed through intensity rather than harmonic resolution.
His operas, orchestral works, and, more recently, his lyrical works—pages of "lyrical fragrance"—bear witness to a constant exploration of rhythm and inner energy.
A Music of Construction
In contemporary atonal music, beauty does not stem from an immediately memorable melody. It arises from construction, and, as in architecture or geometric painting, it involves organizing forces. For over 40 years, and now from Normandy, Dominique has pursued this exploration, asserting an independent position as a contemporary composer committed to formal rigor as much as to expressive intensity.
