Painter Thomas Fougeirol doesn’t paint in the traditional sense of the word; rather, he encrusts canvases with sculptural superficies across which he sprays pigment and blasts debris. If these techniques sound terribly obtuse, their results are anything but. The French artist’s unorthodox manner of painting yields strikingly evocative pictures. “No Furniture, No Picture,” the title of Fougeirol’s current show at Praz-Delavallade, seems a wry allusion to the fact that his paintings often appear as furnishings such as window treatments. His artworks are taut with tension between flat pictorialism and sculptural three-dimensionality. Upon entering the gallery, you are confronted by a large canvas resting on the floor, cantilevered several feet away from the wall. From afar, it appears to be a piece of dirty concrete lifted from a sidewalk or parking lot. Viewed closer, it still looks like a grimy slab scattered with debris and glass shards; but peeking around its edge reveals its status as a painting. Other pictures, created with the same technique of using his studio vacuum cleaner to blow detritus onto freshly painted surfaces, evoke seashells and beach glass having just washed ashore on a stretch of gray sand. Enrobed with furrowed paint, a lineup of small canvases (example above) alternately suggests drapery, bunched fabric, and pahoehoe lava. A monochromatic series coated with grooved paint the texture and color of white chocolate evokes windows shrouded by disintegrating blinds. In celebrating painting’s evocative sculptural capabilities, Fougeirol pushes the medium’s boundaries while remaining squarely within them.

Praz-Delavallade
6150 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90048
Show runs through Nov. 3