Mickaël Doucet

Heliotrope: “No one enters here unless he is a surveyor” is said to have engraved Plato on the pediment of his Athenian Academy to establish the primacy of ideal (geometric) abstraction over vulgar, chaotic, mortal thought. However, looking through the vast bay windows painted by Mickaël Doucet, one does not necessarily see the world in the same way anymore.

The interiors painted by Mickaël Doucet are, by a strange mise en abîme, themselves sort of “places of art and contemplation” … It is a complete painting because in addition to being metaphysical, it is also fundamentally decorative.

Mickaël Doucet’s vanities, of oriental inspiration, seek to blend not into divine transcendence (“vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas” said Ecclesiastes), but into immanence, in other words, into the landscape. Because Mickaël Doucet’s pictorial architecture is also, perhaps above all, a very landscape painting.

Humans are not absent from Mickaël Doucet’s paintings, far from it. What must be understood is that a landscape is an extremely complex and subjective artistic object. Mickaël Doucet’s peaceful and open holiday resorts remind us that landscape is not a setting.

In front of Mickaël Doucet’s paintings, the viewer is not looking at a panorama through large bay windows; like a shao huo, it is disintegrated. Sublimated. Its fragrance freely haunts the place and contemplates one last time the world of men before melting, in peace, into the landscape…”.

Vincent Choffrut