© Photo credits: David Mouras
Ludovic Dervillez (born in 1973) is a French abstract painter. A graduate of the École Supérieure d'Art et de Design de Reims in 1995, he taught there alongside his painting practice until 2005 before dedicating himself fully to his research. An artist-in-residence at La Fileuse (Reims) from 2016 to 2019, he is also the founder and curator of La Grande Gallery. His exhibitions in France and abroad demonstrate a rigorous yet sensitive approach, informed by his interactions with the international abstract art scene.
The ineffable as a horizon
Ludovic Dervillez's painting is developed as a field of experimentation with reality, where each gesture becomes a way of thinking with the material. Rather than seeking to represent, it is about exploring what happens in the very act of painting — that moment when the hand, the mind and the material resonate with each other. The canvas is not an end result, but a field of experimentation: a space where the image is constructed and dismantled to the rhythm of interventions, hesitations and erasures. The work is characterised by a constant tension between control and abandonment, between the visible and that which resists being seen. Painting then becomes a place of presence to oneself and to the world, a space for listening where each trace bears witness to a passage, a state, a thought in motion. What matters is not so much the image obtained as what it reveals about the process: the emergence of a precise form, born of the dialogue between the gesture and the resistance of the material. Part of an internalised expressionist tradition — one in which painting confronts its own limits rather than its brilliance — Dervillez's practice engages in a reflection on the very nature of making: how can we still paint in an era of visual saturation? His answer lies in this attention to the present, in the fragility of the gesture, in the clarity that arises from doubt. Each canvas functions as a meeting place between matter and thought, where painting seeks less to represent reality than to experience its presence.
1. The possibilities of a meeting
In Ludovic Dervillez's work, painting unfolds like thought in action—a space where the visible is developed through the duration of the gesture rather than through the projection of a form. Nothing is premeditated: each canvas is invented in the moment, at the intersection of control and chance, intuition and doubt. What matters is not the image produced, but the very process of its emergence—the tension between what happens and what resists. In this approach, painting becomes the site of a test: that of the gaze, of matter, of thought confronted with its own limits. Dervillez engages the painting as a field of instability, where each trace attempts to articulate a fragile balance between presence and disappearance. If his approach is part of an expressionist lineage, it is in its most internalized dimension—the one that, from Hans Hartung to Joan Mitchell, from Willem de Kooning to Eugène Leroy, conceives painting as a crisis of the visible. We find there less the explosion of the gesture than its stripping bare, less the violence of the body than the lucidity of the gaze. Dervillez shares with these painters the same requirement: to let the material think, until the form wavers and the act becomes presence. Thus, The Possibilities of an Encounter do not refer to an image or a narrative, but to an experience: that of a dialogue between thought and matter, between intention and what escapes. The canvas, here, is not the trace of a gesture—it is the scene of its transformation.
2. Living in the moment
Painting here becomes an act of total presence, a device of embodied thought. Far from any representative aim, Ludovic Dervillez engages the canvas as a field of resonance between interiority and action. Each trace operates as a condensation of experience, a point of friction between the visible and that which resists being. Composition is not a project, but an emergence: it occurs through actions, according to a logic of resonance rather than construction. Matter is no longer a support, but a partner—it thinks, responds, absorbs, resists. Gesture, however, does not express: it experiences, it inscribes the intensity of a passage. The painting becomes a field of instability, a critical territory where painting questions its own possibility. Affiliated with the Action Painting tradition, Dervillez shifts its coordinates towards a space of introspection and contained tension. His approach resonates with contemporary practices such as those of Pat Steir, Callum Innes or Marlene Dumas, where the gesture is no longer an explosion but rather a meditation, a listening to time and matter.
3. Lifelines
Each line in Dervillez's work carries the memory of the gesture, the trace of an inner displacement. Far from a decorative outline, it acts as a pulse, a measure of the living. Painting becomes an act of transcription—not of what is seen, but of what passes through. These lines, sometimes fragile, sometimes insistent, reveal the tension between control and abandonment, between density and disappearance. They mark the thresholds of the visible, the zones of uncertainty where form seems to be searching for itself. Dervillez makes this oscillation a vital principle: the line becomes breathing, rhythm, presence. In this economy of the sign, his work dialogues with the suspended gestures of Cy Twombly, the controlled fragility of Jenny Brosinsky or the emotional density of Emil Nolde - a painting that is written as much as it is perceived, where the trace becomes the place of a thought in action.
4. Pure intensity
Nothing is premeditated; everything stems from listening to the moment. Dervillez approaches painting as a field of experimentation, a space where the relationship between chance and necessity is negotiated. The gesture does not respond to a desire for form, but to a state of availability. In this logic of circumstance, the work is not the result of a plan, but of a process of meaningful revelation, of a confrontation with the resistances of reality—gravity, dispersion, density, cohabitation. The painting thus becomes a place of dialogue with what happens, a space where every accident is an integral part of the pictorial language. This approach, in affinity with figures such as Sam Francis, Raoul De Keyser, and Mary Weatherford, questions the possibility of a painting that is always in the making: a moving presence, where the force of the gesture bears the trace of time.
5. Truth in action
For Dervillez, truth is not conceptual, it is operative. It is experienced in the very act of painting, in the resistance of the material and the lucidity of the gesture. Painting means confronting what escapes, maintaining the tension between will and the unexpected. Each canvas is born from a close encounter with the material: it is in the effort, the friction, the repetition that the precision of the gesture is developed. The painting, far from being an outcome, becomes a moment of truth, a suspension of meaning where the possibility of reality opens up. What Dervillez brings into play is not the representation of a thing, but the very experience of the act: a painting which thinks of itself while being made, which watches itself in the process of happening. There, in this purity, lies the most essential part - the one where painting, stripped of all ornament, rediscovers its primary power: to embody time, thought and presence.
Ludovic Dervillez's work is held within this tension: that of a painting that seeks not to speak, but to experience. Each canvas is a territory of uncertainty, a space where thought is measured against matter and where doubt becomes a driving force of clarity. Rather than asserting, his painting questions—not to resolve, but to keep alive this fragile balance between intention and chance, consciousness and abandonment. In this, it is part of a rare tradition, that of a painting which demonstrates nothing but puts thought to the test of reality. What is at stake here is perhaps the very essence of the pictorial gesture: not the conquest of a form, but the persistence of an act - that of continuing to paint, against all certainty.
