RAPHAEL DURANS

Raphael Durans, born in 1949, son of a painter (Marcel Durans), spent his early youth in Casablanca, Morocco. He started getting interested in abstract expressionism in the 80's and 90's, however, it is only since 1995 that his work really found its true inspiration. Rather bare, it is closer to a minimalistic approach of the concrete art. Folded spaces represent most of his actual work. While he seems to evolve towards color just now, these folded spaces force the silence and liberate the eye from centuries of painting history holding confinement within frames, flatness, impressionist tyranny of the colors, constraints of patterns and of figuration and of the foreseeable deadlocks of abstraction. 

His goal and only imperative is to escape from limits, to leave the traditional chokehold of the painted canvas inherited from the Renaissance, as he considers that art is within space, and that he has to explore each and every possibilities which could exist in the confrontation of created shapes and all dimensions of the surrounding space. 

He is present in numerous private collections in France as well as overseas.