“Wherever crowds gather and wherever men are kindled into brotherhood, there the soul of man is lifted and his spirit rejuvenated.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art historians use the term genre painting to describe depictions of everyday life as distinct from work celebrating mythology, a historical event, ceremony, or persons of high social standing. Peter Bruegel, a Dutch artist of the 16th century, delighted in recording peasant revelries, often with a disguised moral intention. In the first third of the 20th century, a school of American artists engaged in the social realism movement. George Bellows documented historic battles in the boxing ring; John Sloan was fascinated by the lives of working women, often caught in a state of exhaustion at the end of the day gazing out of tenement windows or seeking relief from stifling heat on urban rooftops in the evening. One of the champions of this movement was Reginald Marsh, who found his inspiration in the passing parade of urban street life, seedy bars, and side shows. A more decorous version of his vision was offered by Isabel Bishop, who often concentrated on the lives of young urban women office workers.
Every era of art offers examples of artists fascinated by and compelled to record the daily progress of the human circus: people engaged in labors, diversions, competitions, romances, and musings. Artist Dominique Taquet offers us a glimpse of life here in the Madison area and abroad, sometimes celebrated and sometimes unnoticed until he fixes their activities with his intense and often humorous gaze.
Dominique came to Madison from France in 1998. His family originates in Les Andelys, a commune in Normandy near the city of Rouen, the site of Joan of Arc’s martyrdom and the birthplace of French classicist Nicolas Poussin. He studied drawing there at the École des Beaux-Arts before learning printmaking in Paris at Atelier Montparnasse. Dominique found his ideal medium of expression in the field of intaglio, a form of printmaking encompassing drypoint, etching, engraving, and mezzotint. He traveled to Nice, in southern France, living rough while developing his craft, drawing in the streets of this seaside city. While there, he met his future wife, Vicki, an American working her way around the world. They both moved to Japan for two years, where Dominique found work on a farm, leaving his afternoons for drawing and studying Sumi-e, a form of ink painting on paper, in Nagano.
The family found their way to Madison, where Dominique is now the resident oenophile for Steve’s Liquor. When not selecting wines for discerning connoisseurs, he’s working on his phenomenally ambitious prints in his basement studio. The range of his artistic interests is virtually encyclopedic. His work covers a panoply of subjects: from landscapes to interiors, from contemplative felines to stormy skies. But the true measure of his breadth of achievement are the crowded street scenes and bird’s-eye views of festivals and neighborhoods. They recall the chaos of Hieronymus Bosch’s fevered medieval imagination and the frenzied celebrations and debauchery of Hogarth.
In one of his most compelling large pieces, Willy Street Parade, a large 18- by 24-inch engraving, scores of closely observed and delightfully imagined figures wend their serpentine way across and through a festival of dance and music, magical vehicles, acrobatic displays, enormous puppets, and cheering spectators. Tucked into a corner is a Pulcinella figure, a stock character from the commedia dell’arte of Italian theatre. Harlequins, clowns above the crowd on precarious stilts, bicycle riders, dancers, and babies in strollers add to the revelry and excitement. The celebration is viewed from an elevated height and bracketed by the familiar wood-framed houses of Madison’s near-east side. To add authenticity and specificity to the locale, the crowd surges around a local landmark, Mother Fools Coffeehouse.
A possible key to unlocking Dominique’s unique vision can be found in another unusually large etching, Bear Mound, located at the intersection of Vilas Avenue and Campbell Street, one block north from the zoo. This effigy mound, created sometime between 700 and 1200 CE, is surrounded by houses facing in toward the mound. Dominique has chosen to collapse the actual space between the houses and pack them tightly in a concentric arrangement recapitulated by the trees around them and echoing the placement of the trees at the center. What he’s exploiting in this arrangement is one of the fundamental principles of pictorial design: championing rhythm and harmony over literal depiction. He’s bending reality to exploit the inherent resonance of active life and natural displacement. By insisting on formal design consideration at the expense of objective reality, he draws the viewer spiraling through into the dark mysterious center holding the enigma of this ancient structure, made more elusive by being shrouded in arboreal shelter. Again Dominique has the viewer hovering above the scene, emphasized by the arc of the bird sharply silhouetted in the lower foreground. It’s a bold aesthetic decision made increasingly difficult by his need to rely on imaginative viewing, as this view is unachievable without mechanical assistance. It’s a view often chosen in early Renaissance art called omniscient viewpoint; it’s the view that God would claim from the heavens.
A majority of Dominique’s work is done in black and white using one of many intaglio processes, in which the marks that result in the image are incised either by force, as with engraving and drypoint, or chemically, in the case of etching and aquatint. The surface of the plate upon which the art is made remains clean, and the ink resides in lines and marks below that surface, only being released when the plate and paper are run through a press at intense pressure. Dominique claims that his more aesthetically aware collectors are appreciative of these monochrome pieces, but recently, he has begun to add elements of color, either hand-applied with watercolor or gouache or added with relief printing done as color woodcuts.
Dominque’s work can proudly stand with the best of social realism seasoned with sentimental education and mystery. It can be found on Facebook under his name and at various venues around Madison. His most recent exhibition was at the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics. It will also be on display during the Mount Horeb Spring Art Tour, May 17 through 19.
