Landscape

Original title: Paysage

This is a true landscape, with three superimposed registers: a large powdery pink sky taking up almost half of the canvas; a ridge of several white buildings (a castle? a church with an oculus, a checkerboard tower, houses with blue roofs) set on a line of shrubs or bushes or dark rocks; then an immense pink-mauve cliff plunging toward a grey blue-mauve ground in shadow. It is a very narrative landscape canvas, almost a view of a citadel or of a village perched above a gorge. The pink-mauve palette is very homogeneous, from the powdery pink of the sky to the fuchsia pink of the cliff, with the grey blue-mauve of the ground below as the only real cold note. The village at the top brings off-white, violet and a touch of red, which makes it stand out as a luminous focal point on the horizon. The cliff is the technical tour de force: vertical impasto furrows, like flows of material scraped with a palette knife, which give a real relief of rock or pleated fabric; the line of shrubs or scree between the village and the cliff is treated in small impasto touches that create a very dense texture; the village is painted more finely, in smooth flat areas with a few linear details (windows, oculus, an implicit cross in the architecture), which detaches it well from the rest; the sky is a very soft glaze, almost watercolour-like, with a subtle gradient that opens up the space; the ground below is treated in dark hatching that anchors the composition and evokes a cast shadow. It is a dreamlike landscape, a pink cliff topped by a village as if weightless; the vertigo of the sheer drop occupies most of the canvas, which gives an almost physical sensation of height. Compared with the abstract canvases of the series, this one is more accessible, since it tells a recognisable scene while keeping the same vocabulary of material and texture. The originality of the subject, the technical success of the textured cliff, the pink-mauve chromatic harmony so current in decoration, and the successful contrast between the distance (village) and the foreground (cliff) are the strengths of this composition.