Ludovic Dervillez is a French abstract painter whose work explores the delicate balance between gesture, space, material, and decision. Through a process guided by intuition and careful observation, he creates compositions in which every mark, line, and trace exists out of necessity rather than excess. His recent paintings embrace a more refined and concentrated visual language, demonstrating how subtle interventions, silence, and restraint can generate remarkable intensity and depth.
You describe your painting as a “field of decisions,” where every intervention transforms the entire image. In practice, how do you navigate this constant openness and unpredictability?
When I begin a painting, nothing is defined in advance. I have no predetermined image or form in mind. What might seem like a source of discomfort is actually a form of freedom, allowing me to avoid becoming locked into a preconceived intention. I move forward through a succession of decisions in which each intervention alters the whole. Each decision leads to the next until the painting begins to hold together.
You emphasize that intensity comes not from quantity but from necessity. How do you recognize, within your working process, whether an element is truly necessary?
The necessity of an element is never determined in advance. It gradually reveals itself through the process, through the relationships that develop between the different elements of the painting.
I am equally wary of accumulation and reduction. Too many interventions can diminish precision; too few can weaken the painting.
I often find myself thinking: “If I remove this element, nothing holds together anymore; if I add another one, everything shifts.” It is often at that point that necessity begins to emerge.
I do not rely on any predetermined rule to judge it. Each painting establishes its own conditions, and it is through the consequences of each decision that certain elements eventually impose themselves as necessary.
In your current practice, you describe a shift from gestural density toward more reduced, fragile interventions. What triggered this development, and how has it changed your relationship to painting?
This development emerged from a fairly simple realization. While experimenting with different expressionist approaches, I came to understand that a dense and highly embodied painting, grounded in a certain virtuosity of gesture, was no longer producing the intensity I was seeking. As had previously been the case with figuration, I found myself facing a kind of dead end.
Paradoxically, it was the search for an ever more compelling intensity that led me to gradually reduce the means employed. I began to understand, as in poetry or in the jazz of Miles Davis, that intensity is not a matter of quantity but of necessity. Carefully chosen words often carry more force than a long speech, just as a few notes can possess more intensity than a multitude of others.
This profoundly changed my relationship to painting. My attention shifted from the affirmation of gesture toward the conditions that allow a painting to gain intensity. I began paying increasing attention to the ground, the intervals, and the silences. Gradually, they ceased to be passive spaces and became active elements within the composition.
Your participation in the Anniversary Show as the winner of the open call by New & Abstract places your work within a curated context. What does this presentation mean to you, and how do you see your practice in dialogue with the other positions in the exhibition?
I am especially pleased to participate in this exhibition, as it accompanies an important moment in the gallery’s history.
It is always a pleasure for me to take part in group exhibitions and to place my work in dialogue with the international art scene. I particularly appreciate contexts that allow works to engage with one another.
I am always curious to discover the connections, contrasts, and shared concerns that can emerge between practices that may be very different. I am already familiar with the work of Larissa Eremeeva and Julia Rehme, whose practices I greatly appreciate, and I am very happy to discover the full selection of works in person during the exhibition.
What are you currently working on, and what are your next steps or developments in your painting practice?
I am currently working on several series of medium-format paintings as well as smaller works.
I never seek to change direction radically. From the beginning, the intentions and questions that run through my work have remained essentially the same. If my painting evolves over time, it is more the consequence of these reflections than a deliberate desire to change for the sake of change. Its evolution is therefore closer to a succession of shifts than to changes in direction.
These shifts arise naturally from the questions that continue to occupy me, particularly those related to intensity, decision-making, and painting itself.
This phase still feels very open to me. I have the feeling that I have identified a territory of inquiry that I have not yet exhausted, and whose possibilities I continue to explore through each new painting.
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