Light itself

From 11^th to 16^th April 2023

Galerie Floréal Belleville, Paris 20^ème 

“The world’s appearance would be shaken if we succeeded in perceiving the spaces in between things as ‘things’.” 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

This second Parisian exhibition, Light Itself, is a body of work examining the relationship between light, perception and memory. Together, the large-format works explore non-figurative landscapes through the impressions they have left. The poetic spirit of this approach aims at expressing emotions felt in front of landscapes, through light and colour, in order to retranscribe a sensation, a detail, a gesture. 

The exhibition includes the recent “Giverny Series” an attempt to record the memory of landscape as a place of intimacy (JM Besse), a painted record of memory of the gardens of the house of a great artist; what would Monet’s memory of his intimate landscape of Giverny look like?

As with Monet, light is the protagonist in the paintings. These works attempt to describe not a reflection of light off the surfaces of the landscape but the light travelling between the surfaces and the viewer. Using thin layers of oil paint on aluminum, the light is at the heart of the technique, creating undulating, voluminous and deep surfaces. 

At a time when man’s actions are changing landscapes irreversibly, I am questioning the imprints they leave on our memories through the prism of memory, the survival of a sensation or an experience lived at a specific moment. Abstraction thus allows me, without showing a particular place, to call upon our own experiences, feelings and memories, by bringing them out of the silence of our subconscious. 

The melodious colour harmonies of the canvases are the result of months of work, which begins with the watercolors presented in the exhibition. Through these, we can see the  translation on my response to a landscape, the first subjective impression of seeing an image whose meaning and symbolism I choose. All my reflections on visual perception are in constant dialogue with the ability to question memory, like many artists before me, but above all to bring into focus ghostly whisps of images that I try to rescue from oblivion (S. Krebs).   

Light Itself is my attempt to create a timeless inner space in a swirl of colours that I invite you to look at without seeing, but by feeling. The works attempt to stimulate our senses by immersing us in an abstract, poetic and colourful universe, creating a space conducive to the act of remembering.