Ronald Dupont’s work is informed by photographs that he takes during his international travels, as well as the use of satellite imagery, electronic mapping, and drone photos.His paintings are often innovative versions of what one may see from a satellite or from a bird’s-eye view.His imagery shifts between sharpness and blurriness.
His paintings have photographic quality when viewed from a distance, with perfect proportions and compositions in place; yet, come close and the viewer starts noticing some blurs and smudges and the imagery breaks into abstraction. The viewer’s eye loses itself in the complexity and the richness of Dupont’s compositions, the bold colors and sophisticated textures.
To some extent, that is achieved by mixing oil with Venice Turpentine that enables the artist to capture the vibrating reflections and the incredible energy of a big city – an outsider’s vision in glorious Technicolor
“In my paintings of aerial views of cities, there is figuration and abstraction. It’s a matter of distance. From a distance, the painting is easily recognizable as a city view, but when you come closer, the representation dissolves into a mixture of colors and shades,” states the artist.
The play of figurative vs. abstract is captured in a different way in Dupont’s rain-themed paintings, in which hyper-realistic rain drops and drippings on a glass surface are juxtaposed with blurred out scenery outside the window, recognizable yet not clearly defined. “These rain-themed paintings come from a bus in London. The rain was streaming down the windshield. You could no longer make out the houses, the streets… The colors of the city were mingled and accentuated by the headlights of the cars. There was something poetic, nostalgic… The paintings are a representation of our relationship to reality that we transfigure by looking at it,” says Dupont.
Ronald Dupont was born in 1961 in Belgium where he lives and works today. The artist has been exhibiting his work worldwide for the past 30 years including France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, USA, Lebanon and Dubai. His work is included numerous international collections.
