David Graux, 1970 | Abstract Figurative painter

David Graux was born in Besançon, France, where he still lives and works.

He has experimented with different styles before finding his own unique artistic touch.

His main subject is the beauty and mystery of woman, evoked both through his sensual nudes and through the symbolic richness and Oriental motifs of his colorful backgrounds.

His paintings are, in effect, forms of tangible poetry. Even David Graux’s titles exude poetry, let alone his evocative art.

"Hint of Dew", "The Beauty of Doubt", "The echo of a dream" all suggest the last breath of Romanticism as it meets the impenetrable mystery of Symbolism.

As in Symbolist poetry, Graux’s art combines the accessible with the unintelligible.

Yet the Oriental symbols-invented by the artist and belonging only to the language of his own imagination–are ungraspable. They touch upon the playful and the abstract, never fading into mere background or ornamentation.

On the contrary, they travel the surface of the paintings, functioning as background and foreground alike-as an enveloping atmosphere-to the ethereal figures.

David Graux offers a most personal and original representation of the eternal woman in her purest beauty, and places her against very elaborate compositions reminiscent of Asian cultures, which seem to exert a real fascination upon him.

The titles of his paintings suffice to render the poetry, mystery and passion permeating his works.

Nevertheless, each of his paintings remains an unsolved puzzle, a fluid beauty whose face in never seen, who only wears enough clothes to safeguard her decency, and who appears as levitating on the surface of the canvas, against a no less mysterious background.

This background has nothing figurative about it: it does not show the insides of a house or landscape.

It is rather a pure intellectual construction bordering on abstraction.

It gives the impression that the young lady has come out of the pages of a scholarly book written in a long-forgotten or fictitious language.

Unless all these superimposed messages hanging in mid-air like Japanese Kakemonos are the intimate confidences of the painter to his lover.

The atmosphere, the light which is sometimes dimmed, sometimes shining on the light-colored, bright flesh of his characters, everything is mysterious about these paintings.