Nature becomes an abstract stream of strong and sharp tones in French-American painter Dominique Boutaud’s captivating canvases. Descriptive titles tease the viewer with the suggestion of a figurative interpretation, but Boutaud focuses our attention on texture, movement and color combinations. Using amalgamations of many conventional and unusual methods of application, she sets in place superbly tactile encounters, bringing broad brushstrokes up against meticulous drips and fine scrapings. These tactile juxtapositions often evoke tensions between figure and setting, depth and flatness, but most of all they convey movement and temperature.
Whether dark and solemn or ebullient and bold, Boutaud offers her viewers freedom: to explore, to interpret, to become lost in another world. Her oil paintings create a sense of scale that ranges from the minute to the interplanetary, portraying new spaces that she encourages us to discover. Searing reds and yellows, deep, mysterious blues and surprising, calming speckles of white meet in these compositions, conveying landscapes emotional, natural and immaterial that entreat the eye and propose a journey.