Where the colours come from: a morning in Daniel Mangin’s studio

Most painters keep their light to themselves. Daniel Mangin filmed his.

One sunny October morning, a phone looked out of the window of his studio: roofs close by, then gardens cut into long narrow strips with paths of bare earth between them, fruit trees gone yellow and rust, a row of white houses, and a wide pale sky over all of it. He had made a film like this once before, and he told us why: “to show the light, the source of my colours.”

Keep that sky in mind when you walk through his hall. The yellows are there, and the soft greens, and the rust. So is the white that comes in through the glass before anything is painted.

Turn round from the window and you are in the studio itself. Brick walls. Canvases everywhere, leaning in stacks against the wall, some facing out and some facing in. Rolls of canvas stand in a corner like columns. On a low easel, a large painting in grey and green, crossed by black strokes and a shoal of small red marks. Nothing has been arranged for a visitor. This is a room where work gets done.

Then the work itself. In the next film the phone does not move at all. Daniel, in a white coat, sits down at the easel in front of a blank canvas, with his tubes of paint, brushes and jars on the table beside him. He draws. The first lines go on in quick dark strokes, then more, then he stands up to reach the top of the canvas, steps back, and comes in again. A minute later the white is no longer white. What the lines will turn into, the film does not say, and that is the one thing a finished hall can never show you.

The painter. Daniel Mangin was born in Amiens in 1957 and has drawn and painted all his life. In 1985 he gave himself to it entirely, and spent two years in the Beaux-Arts workshops in Paris with Masurel. He paints in oil on canvas, for its depth: impasto, transparency, and the slow drying that lets him refine a composition and push it further. His subjects have run from the classical to the contemporary, often with a social eye, humour or a political edge. In recent years he has moved towards abstraction, to get past the anecdote, though he has never lost his love of the nude. He has shown in Paris, Brussels, Tokyo, New York and London, won the First Prize for Modern Figurative Art in Brussels in 1996, and the First Prize for Informal Abstract at the Small Format Triennale in Ferrara. He feels closest to Nicolas de Staël, for the force of his colours, and to Mark Rothko, for the depth of his canvases.

The hall. His gallery on The Vilbil Virtual Galleries is called Open your Mind. Twenty-five of his paintings hang there, and the light changes as you walk: one room is bright and lifting, the darker one has the weight of a storm. He calls what he is after a “golden light of humanity’s mind”. The calm he feels in museums, “a warm, peaceful immersion”, is what he wants to give back to whoever comes in.

The hall opens in your browser, with nothing to install, at any hour. Go in after the films. You will know which window the light came through.

Daniel Mangin’s gallery: vilbil.art/en/daniel-mangin

About The Vilbil. The Vilbil is a premium no-code platform for flagship 3D virtual galleries. An artist can build a photorealistic gallery in minutes and place it directly on their own website. Sculptures appear in it as interactive digital twins. Visitors open it in a standard browser, on any device, 24/7, with nothing to install. The Vilbil takes no commission on sales: 0%.