André de Vanny

This work will be on show at Carriageworks from 3-6 September as part of Curatorial+Co.'s Sydney Contemporary 2026 presentation.

André de Vanny explores the tension between the abject and the sublime, drawing on the ethereal qualities of early Renaissance painting and the visual language of contemporary abstraction. His practice is deeply physical, incorporating cycles of disintegration and repair that reflect the human experiences of trauma, resilience, and healing.

Says de Vanny of this work, "I have always loved the way that Yves Klein described his obsession with the infinite, by saying that in the end 'everything returns to blue,' describing this deep blue colour as a gateway to spiritual boundlessness, to the open sky and the immaterial void.

"I began this work by staining the canvas in thin washes over many months. Each wash carried rich and dense pthalo and ultramarine pigments, which allowed the dark blue colour to deepen whilst still preserving the raw finish of the unprimed canvas. Eventually it came time to paint into this ground, and once again I looked to Giotto's St Francis Cycle, specifically in this case 'The Exorcism of the Demons of Arezzo.' Rather than attempting to replicate a transcription of the original work, I approached the painting process more like recalling a memory, drawing only loosely on the reference for some compositional placement and colour suggestions. The goal was to paint faster than I could think, to work almost blindly, and to discover new figures and forms within the scene.

"I have always loved Giotto's original painting for its depiction of such beautiful and almost grotesque architecture, for its mood of ecstatic terror and the thrill of impending doom. In this work, however, after all religious and didactic intentions have been stripped away, what remains is almost like the vision of a child - a scene from a story of cartoon heroes and demons."