Untitled

Original title: Sans titre

A vertical format structured by an irregular dark vertical line, navy blue, almost black in places, which runs across the whole canvas like a crack, a root or a stylised tree trunk. This line organises the space into two large zones: on the left, a plain turquoise field that holds the most original scene of the whole series; on the right, a group of blue, water-green and sand planes that evoke a landscape or an architecture in gradation. The striking element, at the bottom left, is a scattering of pebbles and triangles in colour (glued glass), lilac pink, blue and green, dispersed like stones, fish or confetti on the plain turquoise ground. It is a truly narrative and decorative gesture, very different from the construction in outlined blocks of the other canvases shown. It gives this canvas a lightness and a fancifulness that the other canvases in the corpus did not have. The palette is dominated by a very fresh, almost aquatic blue-turquoise, with touches of sand and light olive green on the right that gently warm the composition, and the lilac pink of the pebbles, which is the only truly warm note. It is a luminous and soothing canvas. As for technique, the central line is heavily impastoed, almost sculpted, with a pronounced relief. The blue zones at the top are smoother, in glazes and scumbles, with layered veils that give atmospheric depth; on the right, the vertical bands of beige, green and blue are worked in soft gradations, with openly vertical colours; the pebbles have a clean outline and a flat fill, which contrasts with the broader gesture of the rest. It is an abstraction that evokes a landscape or a garden under water, with a central fault as its backbone. The contrast between the sweeping gesture of the large flat areas and the precision of the small pebbles is the real success of this canvas.