contemporary art
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several of David Srnyth's paintings bear the names of cities - Rio, Turin, Berlin,Venice. In them the painter has discovered that peculiar effect of our modernity: paintings, like towns, can transform a legible text into a visual "thing" where the letter plays with colours. There is a feeling of playful gaiety which exploits everything which literally comes into view.

PLACES RATHER THAN THINGS

Shapeless walls pretending to be backgrounds, windows, grids and draughtboards, colours in search of their limits, illegible inscriptions: all of these features move David Smyth's paintings far away from representations of figures and things. Instead, his paintings tend to suggest places, expanses, spaces, where the painter leaves it up to us, if we should so desire, to determine their nature. Now, can we actually avoid doing this? Let's go back to Leonardo da Vinci: when faced with spaces which are only vaguely determined, the imagination always gets to work, leading us to believe that there aren't any thoughts without images.
For me, David Smyth's paintings have something scorching about them in the same way that deserts are scorching with their sun and arid land. Amidst these great expanses you walk from one stone or rock to the next, from one undulation to the next, and sometimes you climb cliffs of sand or even try to pinpoint an oasis in the dazzling sunlight. Here too, the eye is on the lookout for landmarks. However, even if such a landmark can be found in the guise of a grid, it does not hollow out the space down deep so that

 things can loom up. The space is flat and bare, that's the truth of the inatter. Just like in dry and sunny deserts, where mirages sometimes appear suddenly. But they do riot suddenly appear on the horizon.There is no horizon here. Here the earth is "vast", devastated. There is an element of play in David Smyth's paintings. There is also a dimension of tragedy. As much as we might allow ourselves to be taken in by the joyful play of changing colours merging into one another as they appear to be dancing around in a ring, holding each other by the hand, the opposite is in fact true : a tormented, base which is vividly animated by the disordered nature of the colours but where the grids or draughtboards no longer appeal to embrace anything other than the debris of things. Even if the shaded backgrounds in David Smyth's paintings are what seduces the observer's gaze first, the "debris" or "near-objects" work at transfixing it. They finish off by cluttering tip the glances which they have solicited from all points of the expanse.They speak of abandonment and solitude in vast places scattered with "trivia".There is something there which doesn't concern the eye of the painter alone, nor the pleasure of the observers' eyes. It has to do with human life as it urges each and every one of us to obstinately keep to our paths, even when disorientated and stumbling, over obstacles. And thus David Smyth's work also appeals to a new form of humanism: the noises of a world which is often disordered and in search of its own order, call to us in ravaged, vacant places.

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