Version française    
 
Be it in a sentence or ten pages, painting can not be summarized; it escapes all discourse. Of course, one can always ramble on, provided that one has some imagination and is capable of finding a verbal equivalent for its colourful eloquence. As Paul Valéry wrote, on should always excuse oneself when speaking about painting… for it is in silence that painting makes forms and colors speak. Indeed, Doti’s forms and colors vibrate on a particulary sensitive register whose variety would be worthy of a symphonist. We should therefore let them reverberate within us. With barely: 35 years of professional experience and already six different equally impressive periods, Doti is coming into full bloom. The sun of his observer’s eye rises quite often to days full of fertile discoveries that we have the privilege of appreciating at each new exhibit. Given his explosive imagination Doti was already in the magic mirror of unprecedented forms and colors before reflecting it on canvas. Some amateur and even some connoisseur art lovers were on the right track when they spontaneously enriched their collections with this young explorer’ utterly surprising innovations.
His studio is replete with roads leading to the unexpected magnificently attesting to how aware he has become of the necessary and constant questioning inherent to an art in gestation. Without this questioning, painting remains but dismal and decorative. Art must progress by plunging heart-first and head-first into the unknown in order to inject new life into its future revolutions. Doti does not set out to revolutionize Painting but tomorrow his magnificent creative vitality may indeed show us an original and regal path of which he alone is the true master. The Boiling Drive of the Catalan Soul Doti is a crucible at the boiling point into which melts the entire destiny of the Slavic people. Having witnessed the series of governments and upheavals that surged forth on France soil, he took on the task of reporting each and every one of them. He transcribed these into what for him is the universal language of painting.

Talent and Heart


When speaking of someone who is “out of the ordinary”, we sometimes say he is something of a “character”. Doti, given his life experience completely corresponds to this definition. Judge for yourselves. The artist was born on April 3, 1951 to Catalan parents abominable fascist regime. As a very young boy, he came to know the anguish of racism when foreigners were accused, at the time, of having come “to take bread out of the mouths of the French” If the targets have changed, these kinds of slurs unfortunately continue to be used by many in France. Doti never tolerated sarcasm and insults. Very proud, he has never baks down when attacked, but responds always responded with words and actions. He has dedicated his life to serving others. He brought together his courage and will to do well, and later earned the respect of all. When he went into early retirement at the age of 53, a great question arose in Doti’s mind: “As active as I am, what am I going to be able to do with myself ?”

That’s talent, and the heart.


Behind rich colors treated with a will to express life, his painting allows us to see and attempts to help us better understand the world in which we live,but above it gives depth to the world and its unlimited dimensions,often unbeareable as after Lady Diana’s death or after the tragical events of 11 Septembe. Doti, the artist, has innovation speak through his work, inviting us to share in exhibits held in places as different. Space where were all able to participate in enjoying Doti’s unlimited colourful imagination. That’s talent, and the heart.

Roots


If work is hard and subjugating enslavement, it is also an occasion for encounters. The son of immigrant parents, Doti is an eternal nomad who knows better than most how “roots” chain one to an imaginary origin. Stock can only be made fertile by not fixing it anywhere permanently. There is no true identity other than through hybridization. As opposed to advertising clichés presenting glowing and stereotyped images in which one finds what one already knows, painting becomes an invitation to make a journey. There is nothing reassuring here. The unknown has an air of familiarity that invites us to cross over the threshold into a world that is at once present and absent. What will we find there? A singular being, with his mysteries and a promise of dialogue, at the same level as that which we will also bring to him. The territory into which we are invented, through which we wend our way, a habitable territory, is not homogeneous. That would be a place of enclosure. If the artist makes the world habitable, it is precisely because he refuses to reduce it to the One (and only, reductive whole), because he opens up the possibility of the imaginary, the presentation of that which is not at present actualized. The image is the co-presence of several possibles, not always compatible in reality.

In Search of a New World


Born in 1951 in the France Doti is an unclassifiable genius of a painter. His thirst for the absolute propels him and makes him fight against anything that stifles liberty and justice. He should be seen as a champion in a period of difficult and formidable mutations. Doti’s painting is certainly one the forms that future Art will take. Meeting Doti cannot leave one indifferent. In fact, as soon as one steps into his studio/home, one knows that something important is going to happen.
At once, his black eyes scrutinize you and fix you, seeking out your true personality. Come to interview him and he’s the one who’s studying you! He hooks onto you, given how intense his inner life really is. Doti needs to express himself and say everything on his mind. He shows surprise if you understand what is important to him. Although he gives the impression of being alone, one nevertheless feels that he is outwardly oriented, towards other people in the world. Nothing of the kind is present in Doti. Doti’s work. Even if he was born in Condom a little more than 53 years ago, he is no hostage to. Yes, Doti interests me because he is an artist who expresses himself with complete freedom, taking on all the risks inherent in doing so. For him being a painter is above all practicing a “faith act” that will allow him one day to discover and find himself. His paintings “serve” to construct himself, even if apparently (although with Doti one should beware of appearances!) some of his works seem to be unstructured. For Doti the only thing that matters is the quest that he has undertaken to seek out a truth that is his own and which is manifested, when one is speaking with him, by somewhat provocative, but always essential expressions. It is important to know how to listen to Doti for very often his truth dwells in the silence separating two phrases, or in the anxious and ironic look he has when he seems to be waiting for an answer, the answer… Make no mistake; Doti is incredibly solid when it comes to his pictorial approach. He knows how to make his way to the center of the labyrinth from which he will re-emerge stronger than before, after having vanquished his Minotaur. Sartre was wrong to say : “Hell is other people”. Rather, it is much more apt to say : “Hell is me, myself and I”. Doti is indomitable, given how important his reality of being is and how much his vision of life leads him through harsh landscapes he knows how to traverse without worrying about the wounds gotten on the way. Having seen some examples of Doti’s work a few years ago, I must say that they made a strong impression upon me. However, these new paintings are even more expressive and perhaps even more moving. This is because there is distress in Doti’s works, a kind of stimulating distress for a man of action, that is, a distress from which change can be born. In a word, this is the courageous unfailing distress needed in order to build. Moreover, and most especially, down deep, Doti has the humanity of the greatest of the great, the humility of those who know that everything is relative and everything is temporary, except for death and ideal love. This does not prevent him from seeking success. Yet if he paints, it is above all to exist in his own eyes and to search his point of departure which is located somewhere beyond the human horizon.

Why paint ?


There are certainly several answers to this question. To plunge into this adventure, in the autumn of one’s years, at retirement after a life of business, devoting a young man’s energy to the task at hand, supposes that one assumes it, each and every moment in the very act of painting. This boils down to a choice: either painting is a retreat from the living world, opening up onto a joyful imaginary realm; or, one goes into it with the human experience acquired in these places where all beauty seems excluded. Doti has opted for the latter path. Even in his most abstract paintings, the relationship to the real is palpable. This is the opposite of what is true of an illustrative image. Coming out of an era of official propaganda, we have now entered into one of spectacular images that circulate, are communicated and confirm each person in his/her situation. These images only ask to be recognized given the extent to which they are imposed upon us.

Territories


The canvas becomes an imaginary territory that the spectator is invited to journey through, explore, and inhabit. Territory: not just a simple expanse, but a composition of differentiated an hierarchically arranged places, a space for moving along (course), for settling down (mooring) and for belonging (attachement). The color gives value to the differences by constituting zones of greater or lesser intensity, sometimes separated by a line. More often than not, the line is painted, more or less thick or permeable, simultaneously separating and joining the different places, ensuring exchanges or transitions among them. The painted surface shows a course or itinerary: the path of the painter that inhabited it, whose strokes show the traces and the rhythm of it to us; the path of an unguided and unconstrained eye, but one that simply knows not to be the first occupier and not to be all alone its path. So, does Doti have a message to impart? I think that, more genuinely he only wants to speak in the language that his is own, in painting: he has nothing to defend and no one to convince. His wish? Perhaps his wish is to commune with those who have the same nature as he does, with those who also think that life must be lived for what is most undefined about it and what is most imperceptible within it.

To Resist


To resist, in order to seek out humanity in places where one is not used to looking for it, that Is the rage that drives him. For Doti, painting is a way thinking: the sensory and the imaginary are conjugated with reflection. “Nothing human is foreign to me” – Terence’s dictum could be his motto. Such is his fidelity, or his faith, as it were. We understand then why his relationship to abstraction is a troubling one. What I suggested concerning the division of his work into three acts hints at this problem: it is always possible, as the titles of the works often suggest, to see in his paintings a reference human, to experience, starting with the sensory, or even a simple sensation, an ungraspable visible without the moment of reflection.

Exigency and jubilation


How can one recognize that a painter is a painter? In the singularity of his forms, his unique way of placing them in space, his mysterious use of materials and colors – between the fluidity of a Matisse and the dense pastiness of a Tapiès, to cite the extremes. The authentic creator is undoubtedly the one who succeeds in extracting his language from each of these components and making it work via an imperious necessity. In the opposite case, he is nothing more than an epigone or a show-off of a picture-maker. I took the risk of this seemingly obvious preamble in order to reaffirm, as one might have already understood, that Doti belong to cite the extremes. Doti uses painting and drawing as a support for universal expression which is stronger, more effective and more international than language. As fort the style that Doti developed, we might say that it is a combination of figurative and surrealist art, from which very strange beings that inhabit this earth are born, seen as they would be if subjected to the inquisitorial eye of a supreme being other than of their Creator.

Colors


Colors generously or thickly applied. Yellow ochre, red ochre; aquamarine blue; heat of radiating yellows; the nuances of whites moving to grays. Color is the very matter of painting, the substance of things that at the same time constitutes pictorial space. In Doti’s Work, forms do not proceed from an abstract line or an idea, but rather are steeped in the matter from which they are made. Color constitutes form in the two years.
First, it confers it with the energy that allows it to exist, expressing the power without which it could not affirm itself where is. Later, the entire canvas is inhabited by color, as if traversed by different fluxes of energies. The form then appears as a singular concretion, unable to exist apart from the relationship it entertains with the milieu in which it participates. A first approach of Doti’s paintings enables us to observe several forces.They sometimes drive him to create simultaneously paintings of différent styles which are reconcialated in his personality: . either in the harmony of the still-lives .or even sensual one,or even with contrasted shades,all the suggest the unescapable death,according of course to the described objects. .the soft aspect of the creased canvass let us guess many ounds transcended by colours. It is then we understand the reason for the innumerable craquelures forming the plot work of each canvas. Cracks of time, arborescent filaments, covering layers, genealogical strati: the dribbles of oil an acrylic contribute to squaring off the space. Retracted, the chromatic scheme can appear as a refuge but also as a gossamery trap. Henceforth an organic fabric, the space becomes a body: a suffering body indeed, but also a living body. What were heretofore witnesses, oval faces and pupils rotundities change into just as many cells, eggs, and dynamic embryos. And the woman, heavy and filled with human seed, suddenly becomes fascinating. Usually appearing at Christ’ side, the feminine creature with her smooth, stomach, seems to be first and foremost a principle of genesis: fertile earth, protective light and a delicate haven. Yet nonetheless, here and there, the efflorescence of pale stretch marks and thin varicose veins reminds us of the adverse principle active in every genesis. A vast requiem, Doti painting is as entirely traversed by the forces of life as it is by the fractures of death. Better: a wound with visible scars, it never stops affirming life in death. I will attempts to show this at work in a few specific paintings. The whole difficult id not to tack on general concepts to paintings that will not support them. It is therefore necessary to make an effort to consider each unique work in and of itself. Indeed, each painting obliges the spectator to do so: the whole of Doti painting distance itself from what one could call the “commonplace” of human sensations, from what might fit everyone’s sensitivity simply because it taps into what it is to feel. Such» commonplace” feelings are indeed a condition of individuality. Yet individuality only exists by singularizing through an ambiguous experience some aspects of this common pre-individual plan. Doti attempts to exhibit this singular uniqueness in his painting at the risk of dividing his audience. One cannot look at his canvases by first trying to recognize oneself, but rather, on the contrary, by questioning what is unique about it, just as when we meet a human being with whom we become friends. Any other approach is “too generalistic” as ha says. It should be understood that what is at issue is the “One” (or “We”), this pre-individual instance, that anonymous entity in which we feel we can only find ourselves by getting lost within it. For the same reason, eye movements never descend: the light does not come from an external, transcendent source. Inseparable from shadow, it is a mode of exploration and investigation of what is shown on the canvas, immanent to the forms and the space of which it an expression.

he must put colors in the future tense


I mentioned above how a painter could be identified by his forms. This “Spirit of forms” about which Elie Faure wrote so many admirable pages must be sought out by the creator in order to attempts to grasp the intimate meaning of figures in time and space. Each painter or sculptor should keep this ingenious critic’s words in mind: “The whole (hi) story of an artist, the whole history of a school, the whole history of art is dominate and conditioned by this drama – by the undying desire to retain the universal life constantly escaping us in an image capable of defining it once and for all.” On my own behalf, by way of a conclusion, I will say that painter must barricade space with a network of intelligible signs to atomize his brain into a work of art. To paint a beauty – be it a tragic one – he must put colors in the future tense.