These creations hold a special place in my artistic journey. For a long time, flat planes of color left me indifferent, associated—without any real thought—with mere coloring. Then came the Graceful Ones, almost as a taste for risk. Other projects followed, affirming the same pictorial radicalism: an assertive frontality, sovereign geometry, and an absence of unnecessary sophistication.
Here, the subject emerges in the immediacy of color and the rigor of construction. Without superfluous details, the image immediately reveals its strength and meaning—a self-evident quality inherent to contemporary geometric figurative painting.
The absence of perspective, the architectural precision of the spaces, and the meticulous balance of light all reflect a deliberate choice: everything is said. Even the gradations are built up in distinct steps, creating a vibration that reinforces the overall dynamic.
Perhaps this is the gesture of a musician more than that of a painter.
Dominique Dupray.
(Click on the paintings to enlarge them)
Serie : Oblique Cities
This series explores the city as a mental architecture: vertical, fragmented, silent. Spaces seem inhabited by absence, perspectives open or close, and the sky becomes a negotiable surface.
Serie : (Parenthesis)
With this series, Dominique Dupray unites two inseparable acts: writing and painting.
Each painting originates from an aphorism of his own creation, which then becomes its visual translation. The image does not illustrate the text: it extends it, shifts its perspective, questions it.
This series of contemporary paintings explores profound existential tensions: memory, time, survival, and inner emancipation. Through a recognizable visual language—geometric structures, stylized figures, fragmented spaces, and chromatic contrasts—the artist gives form to thought.
Serie The Bestiary
 |  |
|---|---|
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
 |  |
The Bestiary is a series of contemporary paintings in which animals are inscribed within a structured geometric universe, at the boundary between abstraction and figuration. Each work features an animal presence—monkey, bird, insect, or fish—integrated into architectural compositions made of strict lines, flat areas of color, and fragmented perspectives.
Between geometric art and stylized figuration, the series explores the tension between life and structure. The animals are not represented in a naturalistic manner: they become symbols, graphic signs, fully-fledged plastic elements. Bold colors, repetitive rhythms, and angular forms construct a coherent and immediately identifiable visual language.
Ce bestiaire contemporain propose une réflexion subtile sur notre rapport au vivant dans des espaces ordonnés, urbains ou mentaux. Chaque toile fonctionne comme une scène autonome, tout en participant à un ensemble cohérent où abstraction, narration visuelle et symbolisme se rencontrent.
Serie : Coastal
Littoral is a contemporary painting series that explores the marine world through a unique geometric style, blending stylized figuration and colorful abstraction. Mermaids, whales, and sardines become the protagonists of a reinvented aquatic world, at once poetic, ironic, and visually structured.
The maritime imagery engages in a dialogue with architectural compositions, taut diagonals, and vibrant flat planes of color. Angular forms, chromatic contrasts, and repetitive rhythms create a tension between the depths of the sea and the graphic surface.
Between geometric art and contemporary symbolism, the series questions transformation, movement, and the staging of life. The marine world becomes a theater: the creatures seem to evolve under an external, almost industrial or scenographic gaze.
Far from the naturalistic landscape, Littoral thus offers a contemporary vision of the sea composed of visual storytelling and vibrant color energy.
A female figure reduced to the physical forces driving her actions: in this case, riding a bicycle. A nod to the Futurists. Acrylic on wood. 70 x 100 cm. 2017. Framed in a floater frame. Original artwork, signed.
The arrangement of the planes here is such that the empty center becomes the true point of equilibrium through the convergence of the sides. This point of equilibrium is further enhanced by the deliberate choice of a height-to-width ratio that clearly favors the height. Acrylic on paper mounted on wood. 115 x 54 cm. 2014. Framed in a floater frame. Original work, signed.
This painting can be viewed horizontally or vertically. Half of it is in shades of gray, as it depicts the painting process on the color assembly line. A few faces of colorists are visible. Showers are suggested in the side views. Acrylic on wood. 72 x 180 cm. Original work, signed.
A female figure reduced to the physical forces driving her actions: in this case, riding a bicycle. A nod to the Futurists. Acrylic on wood. 70 x 100 cm. 2017. Framed in a floater frame. Original artwork, signed.
Mini-serie : Mechanics
Mechanics is a contemporary painting series that explores the industrial world through a precise and narrative geometric style. Gears, assembly lines, and pendulums compose a structured visual language where the machine engages in a dialogue with the human and animal figure.
In Geisha Skiing on a Bicycle Under a Blasé Sun, The Clock That Began Without Its Pendulums, or Grease Showers on an Assembly Line of Colors, mechanics become rhythm, backdrop, and tension. Angular forms, fragmented perspectives, and flat areas of color create dynamic compositions where the human figure seems caught within a larger system.
Between abstraction and stylized figuration, the series questions time, repetition, and the poetic absurdity of mechanical movement, offering a contemporary and symbolic interpretation of the technological world.
Mini-Serie Dreamlike Abstract
Dreamlike Abstract is a mini-series of contemporary geometric figurative paintings in which Dominique Dupray explores the boundary between constructed abstraction and the imaginary. Through Cabaret féminin, Les cadres communiquants, and Mise en abyme, the artist develops a dreamlike universe structured by bold flat planes of color, rigorous architecture, and assertive use of color. Each composition plays with the frame, the viewer's perspective, and the staging, affirming a personal artistic style that oscillates between geometric tension and poetic resonance.
First flat areas
The First Flat Colors mark a foundational stage in Dominique Dupray's work. They lay the groundwork for a contemporary geometric figurative painting where color structures space and the human figure becomes a symbol.
These contemporary compositions are organized around bold flat colors, clean lines, and simplified forms. Silhouettes, faces, and symbols emerge from a rigorous geometric construction. The narrative remains suggested: each canvas leaves the viewer free to interpret.
Color plays a central role and asserts an immediate presence. Contrasts energize the image, while the repetition of forms creates a strong visual rhythm.
Through these paintings, Dominique Dupray asserts a unique artistic identity within the landscape of contemporary painting. Her work explores the balance between abstraction and figuration, structure and emotion, geometry and humanity.
These "First Flat Colors" thus reveal the foundations of a personal visual language, where the simplification of forms intensifies expressive power.
Les Gracieuses series features a single figure, depicted in each work in situations that highlight its futility.
Each painting tells a story.
A situation rather than a pose.
The beach, the night, the stage, the mechanical object.
Les Gracieuses move in a world where the everyday subtly slips into the absurd.
The titles play with words, shift meaning, and create a second level of interpretation. There is humor, but also a touch of the uncanny.
Formally, the series relies on a highly structured approach: superimposed planes, strong diagonals, fragments of objects, and partial framing. The figure blends with the architecture of the painting, sometimes even merging with it. The settings become almost mechanical through the obstinate geometry in which Gracieuse finds herself caught within these structures, sometimes placed under tension.
Serie "Les Gracieuses"
The repetition of the Gracieuse is not redundancy but a principle. She acts as a motif, almost as a sign with her raised arm, an emblem of a blissful, accepted, and almost defiant superficiality. From one painting to the next, it is not her personality—if we grant her one—that matters, but her way of inhabiting each situation.
Some works tend toward narrative, others toward abstraction.
The Gracieuses thus form a coherent whole at the boundary between narrative and form, where humor navigates between title and image within a visual rigor that resonates with the blissful astonishment of the heroines.
Mini-serie Amazons
The central figure is a woman I knew, whose bovine nature shone through her seductive veneer as soon as you scratched the surface. Here, she is coming down from the mountain pastures to go to the city. The background is an oilcloth she might have used as a tablecloth to entertain guests. Acrylic on paper mounted on wood. 60 x 114 cm. 2014. Framed in a floater frame. Original work, signed.
The entire scene is frozen as if the Amazons had just emerged from a glacier and were hibernating like mammoths. The cubit moon is transparent not merely for descriptive purposes, but primarily to break up the intersecting lines. This technique is somewhat of a recurring theme in all my flat-color compositions. Acrylic on paper mounted on wood. 60 x 120 cm. 2014. Framed in a floater frame. Original work, signed.
The central figure is a woman I knew, whose bovine nature shone through her seductive veneer as soon as you scratched the surface. Here, she is coming down from the mountain pastures to go to the city. The background is an oilcloth she might have used as a tablecloth to entertain guests. Acrylic on paper mounted on wood. 60 x 114 cm. 2014. Framed in a floater frame. Original work, signed.
With this mini-series, Dominique Dupray extends her exploration of the stylized female figure through a new incarnation: the Amazon. More angular, more architecturally structured, she moves within a fragmented space where lines, stripes, and blocks of color become veritable territories.
In Amazon Embedded in the Cradle of a Cloud, the silhouette is interwoven within a shifting geometry. The cloud becomes structure: shelter as much as constraint. The Amazon appears simultaneously captive and pilot, caught in a tension between poetic lightness and rigorous construction.
With Sleepwalking Amazon Wandering in a Bent Moonbeam, the space becomes nocturnal. The deliberately angular moonbeam breaks with any romantic gentleness. The wandering becomes graphic, almost architectural. The figure advances, suspended between dream and mental trajectory.
In these works, Dominique Dupray asserts a visual language based on the verticality of the figures, the tension between feminine fluidity and geometric framework, and a narrative suggested rather than described.
Based in Normandy, the artist constructs a subtle dialogue between freedom and constraint, sky and structure. Here, the dream is never fleeting: it is structured.
Before the Premiers Aplats series, Dominique Dupray developed an instinctive painting style, born from gesture and the material itself. At that time, he did not begin with preparatory sketches: the composition emerged directly from contact with the paint, on the paper or canvas.
These works are created spontaneously. Color is projected, stretched, and layered. Forms appear and then transform as the work progresses. The artist allows himself to be guided by the reaction of the pigments, by chance occurrences, and by the density or transparency of the layers.
Space is not yet structured by geometry; it is traversed. Vertical lines, swirls, bursts of color, and somber tensions convey an inner quest rather than a formal one. Some canvases evoke landscapes in flux, others natural forces or architectures in the making.
This period marks a crucial phase: that of free, impulsive, almost physical exploration. Painting is a living material, a field for experimentation and listening.
One can already perceive the beginnings of a personal language—an attention to tension, balance, and construction—which will later find a more structured form in Premiers Aplats (First Flat Layers).
Before the Structure
