(Click on the paintings to enlarge them)
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.
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.
Tableau figuratif stylisé : au centre, une silhouette androgyne urbaine flotte sur un asphalte bleu. Elancée, sans visage défini, elle est vêtue d’un long vêtement violet aux plis fluides qui s’évasent au premier plan. Elle avance le long d’une route blanche bordée d’arbres roses stylisés, traversant une ville composée d’immeubles colorés aux façades texturées. Un ciel vert pâle et des formes géométriques violettes encadrent la scène. Acrylique sur bois. 66x93 cm.Encadré.Oeuvre originale signée
(Nous ne vivons pas dans l'Avant. Nous ne vivons pas dans l'Après. Nous vivons dans un pli du temps) Dans cette composition dédi ée à la réalité de l'instant, trois mondes identiques se superposent privés d'orientation avec leur planète dotée d'une sorte d'œil. De petits êtres flottent dans un faisceau. Acrylique sur feuille marouflée sur bois. 103x60 cm. Encadré. Oeuvre originale signée.
La lumière envahit l’espace. Les formes se raréfient. Presque minimaliste l'oeuvre est suspendue dans une clarté apaisée. Après la densité et la tension, vient l’ouverture. Acrylique sur feuille marouflée sur bois 80x56cm. Encadré. Oeuvre originale signée.
Tableau figuratif stylisé : au centre, une silhouette androgyne urbaine flotte sur un asphalte bleu. Elancée, sans visage défini, elle est vêtue d’un long vêtement violet aux plis fluides qui s’évasent au premier plan. Elle avance le long d’une route blanche bordée d’arbres roses stylisés, traversant une ville composée d’immeubles colorés aux façades texturées. Un ciel vert pâle et des formes géométriques violettes encadrent la scène. Acrylique sur bois. 66x93 cm.Encadré.Oeuvre originale signée
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 The Bestiary
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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.
This contemporary bestiary offers a subtle reflection on our relationship with the living world in ordered spaces, whether urban or mental. Each canvas functions as an autonomous scene, while also contributing to a coherent whole where abstraction, visual narrative, and symbolism converge.
Personnage féminin réduit aux moteurs physiques de son action. En l'occurrence faire du vélo. Clin d'œil aux futuristes. Acrylique sur bois. 70x100 cm. 2017. Encadrée avec une caisse américaine. Oeuvre originale signée.
L'organisation des plans est ainsi faite ici que le centre laissé vide devient le véritable point d'équilibre par la convergence des côtés. Point d'équilibre favorisé par le parti pris d'un rapport hauteur/largeur franchement à l'avantage de la hauteur. Acrylique sur feuille marouflée sur bois. 115x54 cm. 2014. Encadré avec une caisse américaine. Oeuvre originale signée.
Deux lectures pour cette peinture. Horizontale ou verticale. La moitié est en tons de gris car en cours de peinture sur la chaîne de montage de couleurs. Quelques visages d'ouvriers coloristes. Les giboulées sont suggérées dans les plans latéraux. Acrylique sur bois. 72x180cm. Oeuvre originale signée.
Personnage féminin réduit aux moteurs physiques de son action. En l'occurrence faire du vélo. Clin d'œil aux futuristes. Acrylique sur bois. 70x100 cm. 2017. Encadrée avec une caisse américaine. Oeuvre originale signée.
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 : Mechanics
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.
Serie : Coastal
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.
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.
First flat areas
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.
Serie "Les Gracieuses"
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.
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
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 Structure
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).
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.
