Bothness
<p>I recently encountered two large untitled marquetry works by Hubert Duprat, dating from 2001. One featured an undulating shape, a wavy stack of sawn curves in brown shades of Indian ink-stained plywood; the other, made the same way, looked something like a self-contained burst of pointy flame. Both, it turns out, draw their iconography from the Apocalypse Tapestry (1377–82) in the Château d’Angers, in the Loire Valley, a work that was in turn based on the Book of Revelations. It’s tempting, given the preponderance of narrative in contemporary art, to seize upon the latter fact as a key to the taciturn semi-abstractions here, inflate its importance and align these works with some foreboding narrative about the end of the world. Let’s not, though, because Duprat is not a storytelling artist. Or, rather, any storylines you might pick up are peripheral dazzle rather than central to his aims…</p>
Authors: Martin Herbert
Artists: Hubert Duprat
Part of: TextWork
ISSN: 27269949