Denis GUFFROY

Born in 1958 in Dreux, Denis Guffroy lives and works in Paris. His painting is a research on the landscape and the conflicting relationship of attraction and repulsion that he claims to have with nature.

He explains his approach as follows:

“My family history was interrupted and its roots lost during the Second World War. So I strive to create a world of expression and impressions of the original landscape using the reminiscences surfacing at the edge of my consciousness.

This absent identity and this interrupted story, without which memory is lost, can only be represented confusedly in limited spaces, but with ideas that are very open to all pictorial forms and also very abstract like color projections, flat of materials, lines and traces to capture the eye with a landscape narrative which is the principle of identity.”

Denis Guffroy’s painting is totally improvised, as is the case with many painters, and his work, repeated in series, on colors, light and form aims to generate a kind of catalog of an unsubdued and almost virgin imagined to compensate for this lack of deep territorial roots and to create a link of continuity with this broken family history. The painting thus becomes a sum of informal and emotional gestures beyond which a new narrative begins.

A graduate in architecture, Denis Guffroy took plastic arts classes with F. Benrath at the Versailles School of Architecture from 1982 to 1984.

In 2016, he definitively stopped his career as an architect and devoted himself entirely to painting, multiplying personal exhibitions and international fairs in order to show his works to as many people as possible and to confront himself with the eyes of other experienced artists.