The idea is to work on a pictoral installation of a landscape separated into several paintings. Each part of the landscape is a cameo. The 6 paintings form a gradient, a rainbow of colours representing the visible spectrum of light. This sequenced landscape is a tangible representation of a fictional landscape. Metaphorically, the exhibition space, the white cube, can be imagined as a prism used to break down white light, the tool that reveals the landscape.
Through their organic and fantastic nature, forms - perhaps botanical, perhaps animal, perhaps alien - unfold and open up, motionless, vibrant; they add a magical side to the paintings, they are the actors of my multicoloured landscape which, here, is a rainbow.
The appearance of a rainbow is quite rare. Its visibility depends on the alignment of the sun, the spectator and the water. Scientifically, it is composed of six dominant colours, but its representation varies from three to nine colours depending on the culture.
Newton's seven colours are now universal: blue, indigo, violet, yellow, red and orange. The addition of indigo between violet and blue is still a mystery today, but it probably stems from the scientist's theological ideas in order to align science with his beliefs. In this way, the rainbow is not only an optical phenomenon, but also a reflection of the 7 days of the creation of the world, the 7 deadly sins and the 7th heaven.
The pictorial representation of a landscape in cameo shades leads to its distortion, producing an artificial appearance. Kant writes that, like garden art, a landscape painting is "purely aesthetic". It plays at imitating nature by assembling the elements of air, earth and water through the resources of light and shadow alone. If painting imitates nature, does the garden imitate painting itself?
This project does not seek to represent "nature" in a conformist way. This interpretation by the artists is by definition condensed, since it brings together features that are never found together in a single natural subject.
In this project, the desire not to imitate nature leads to the production of an image whose compositional laws are not those imposed by the living. According to William Gilpin, for there to be composition, there must be light and parts. For there to be parts, there must be fracture and fragmentation: this idea led to the format of the paintings. It is the fractures between the colours (lines) that give the landscape its structure, a rhythm that makes it attractive to the eye, a space conducive to the imagination.
The opposition of the solid and the broken in this installation runs through all the paintings that form the landscape; it defines a specific mode of vision, linking the whole to the parts. The use of the symbolism of the rainbow serves to make the viewer aware of the fragility and immateriality of the landscape and its fleeting nature. The harmony of the installation plays on two aspects: the actors-elements of its composition and their assembly. It is indeed because everything is mixed that everything is connected. It is this combination that the sensitive eye perceives in the landscape: a scenography of incidents.
In these paintings, the natural forms are both witnesses to the creative process and an informal spectacle carrying the virtuality of previously found forms. The sensitive appearance of the plants has no spatial reality, but is simply painted in the eye of the viewer according to its appearance on the surface. For me, landscape painting is an imperfect art. It is an exercise in perception that relates to the human perception of nature.
This "perfection of the imperfect" is exercised in the processes of assemblage and collage to be completed by the imagination. Not by my imagination as an artist inventing subjects and composing images, according to the norms of an ideal nature, but by the imagination of the viewer who must feel and translate in turn what is painted on the canvas.
The installation plays on two feelings: hope and disillusionment. The appearance of the rainbow is an optical effect, an illusion. It oscillates between a joyful and magical image, a good omen, and the sensation of a furtive moment destined to disappear. It forms an arch, a bridge, it is the moment of the passage from rain to fine weather and its unreal, impalpable, perishable side. This fleeting landscape represented in my paintings is the crystallization of an elusive moment.
