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
2. Contemporary Music and Geometric Painting: The Visible Rhythm
3. What is contemporary atonal music ?
4. A strong local connection
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.
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 bewildering. 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.
Dominique Dupray's Position
After beginning within the tonal soundscape for the first 20 years of his career as a composer, Dominique Dupray subsequently broke away to explore not atonality, but a language wildly liberated from all forms. The use of tonal or atonal elements is solely determined by the specific situations dictated by his personal aesthetic, as expressed in the text of his libretti or the subject matter of his works (see: *Le Rêve aux 7 Nuits* and *L'Homme Qui Avait Parlé au Bonheur*, on the "Stories" page).
From Normandy, Dominique continues this exploration, asserting his independent position as a contemporary composer committed to his own sonic coherence as much as to expressive intensity, as illustrated by his latest creations featured in the "lyrical" pages.
A strong local connection
An artist's studio in Seine-Maritime.
Painting in Seine-Maritime is not simply about producing artworks; it's about embedding an artistic practice within a specific territory. It is here, since 2013, that Dominique Dupray has been developing his artistic practice as if it were a single, unified whole. Contemporary music and geometric figurative painting converse in this same space—a calm environment conducive to concentration and formal exploration.
Being a local artist doesn't mean being isolated. On the contrary, it allows for the development of a continuous and visible presence.
An integrated studio within the exhibition space.
His studio is an extension of a permanent exhibition space housed in a former shop with a large window, allowing passersby to discover the artworks without having to enter, as it is not (yet) a gallery. This unique configuration creates a direct link between creation and presentation, a dialogue between artist and public.
Art becomes part of everyday urban life. It becomes visible, accessible, and integrated into local life. The viewer can perceive the process as much as the result. A true unity between creation and presentation is formed. Moreover, exhibiting in a former shop affirms that an artistic space can emerge in the heart of a city, enlivening it and providing autonomy to the artist, even outside the mainstream art world.
Far from major urban centers, the artist enjoys a unique independence. His artistic exploration is not driven by fleeting trends, but by an inner necessity. Dominique Dupray thus develops a coherent body of work in which painting extends a reflection long ago initiated in his music. Painting then becomes an act of continuity: a fundamental work undertaken over time.
