Pink rock

Pink Rock – oil and pastel painting, 84 x 84 cm

Work selected by the National Society of Fine Arts of Paris to be exhibited at the 160th edition of the Salon d'hiver at the Cordeliers refectory.

Pink Rock - oil and pastel on linen dimensions: 84 x 84 cm - SOLD

To talk about the technique of this canvas, it's an oil painting with a mix of dry pastel and oil pastel, which is a little different from how I usually work, which is purely with oil paint.

The pastel studies on paper really opened things up for me in terms of interpretation and texture of the image, as well as in terms of the mark-making. It bridged the gap between the work I do with lead pencil and painting. For me, these remained two languages, and this work of blending techniques formed a link between these two worlds. The results showed a new interpretation of the image, and I wanted to continue this exploration with the canvas.

With Pink Rock, the painting I am presenting at the Cordeliers refectory, I wanted to recapture that slightly freer quality of drawing or sketching. There's a mark that's a little more captured on the fly, a little more instantaneous, which gives life to the image.

With oil painting, I find that sketches are very lively, you can feel the impetus and they breathe, and I find that sometimes, with the final painting, it ends up being too worked, that's a bit of the danger, that it becomes frozen. Especially in terms of landscape study, but I think that's also true in a broader sense for painting.

What's important for me in this first canvas is to retain the spontaneity of the study, let the gesture be more present, see the construction lines, and not necessarily finish things too much, but rather leave them open and free to interpretation. So that whoever looks at it can, themselves, complete the line and fill in the unfinished spaces.

With the subject of rocks, I return to a subject that is dear to me. And there, in Perros-Guirec, during these walks along the pink granite coast, I felt like I was on another planet. The color of the rocks and their play of light, these pink hues with bluish shadows, an absolutely magnificent color palette. With these enormous rocks in balance, with incredible shapes and expressions.

There is something about the proximity of the sea. Of these two elements, this mineral that is there, which has weight, anchored, and the sea which is constantly in motion and crashes onto it, moving.

Pink Rock is representative of the work and research I am currently engaged in, which is to find a way to remain very free with painting and to interpret this back and forth, this movement between the solid, the fixed, and the movement of elements and life.

And to let the image breathe, be in motion, like the landscape.