Dominique Thiolat (born 1946) Composition Oil on canvas signed and dated lower left 162 x 130 cm Condition report: Framed, slight dent/scuff in centre right Born in Blois in 1946, Dominique Thiolat was strongly influenced by American abstraction and its monumental formats. His first idols were Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still. He painted standing up, with his canvas on the floor, sometimes with a brush in each hand, and made his mark on the French art scene in the 1970s with several exhibitions at the Daniel Templon gallery. In 1978, he co-founded the magazine "Documents sur..." with Norbert Cassegrain, Jean-Yves Langlois, Christian Sorg, Pierre Nivollet and Marcellin Pleynet, in which artists and theoreticians discussed the end of painting, which had been tirelessly predicted since the post-war period. Thiolat found a practical response through the use of collage in his creative process, rediscovering the subject without imposing a figure on the viewers of his canvases. In 1980, he produced a series of paintings based on Édouard Manet's Olympia. In 2013, the Paul Rodgers Gallery in New York, which champions such artists as Hantaï, Reigl and James Bishop, devoted an exhibition to him! The gallery owner, who had already exhibited him alongside some of the great names in contemporary art in 1982 - "The Subject of Painting: A Selection by Paul Rodgers of nine contemporary painters working in France: Bishop, Cane, Devade, Dezeuze, Hantaï, Nivollet, Reigl, Thiolat, Viallat", Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; Cartwright Hall, Bradford and Museum of Modern Art, Bristol - entitled his show "Dominique Thiolat, a painter born"! "Thanks to him, we can once again appreciate the arbitrariness of this distinction, which relegates the abstract and the figurative to watertight categories. You get the feeling that the painter is on the borderline between the two notions and that, without ever formulating anything identifiable, he is just as adept at conjuring up images as he is at making them fade away. There is undoubtedly a great magic of colour in his work, a philosophy of reality that is impossible to grasp except in its differences of intensity, a poetics of the impalpable - of the phantasmagoria of impressions - that can only be achieved between shadow and light, density and transparency, gush and fixity, scattering and structure." Danièle Gillemon