Christian Sorg — Los prados — Dutko / Quai Voltaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In about 2 months: February 6 → March 22, 2025

From February 6 to March 22, 2025, Dutko Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition by French artist Christian Sorg (b. 1941). A series of large-format canvases produced between 2022 and 2023, entitled Los Prados, will be presented. The exhibition catalog will be accompanied by previously unpublished texts by art critic Claude Lorent and writer Marc Blanchet.

Since his earliest paintings, Christian Sorg has been working in the symphonic concert of pictorial abstraction, finding his chords and affinities outside the theoretical or discursive paths that could narrow his field of investigation. With total freedom of action, where his nervous, decisive gestures, sometimes gentle and temperate but always well asserted, impulse the lines of force as much as they bring spaces into existence and insert inscriptions, the artist induces a singular, personal, vibrant, emotional path, in an intimate accord that he weaves with his vital environments. His recent decision to develop a series of paintings entitled Los Prados (The Meadows) underscores his connection with nature, with the earth, with the incomparable diversity of the world he lives in, and his determination to seize the smallest, most invisible fragments of it and transpose them pictorially, with no other prerequisite than the decisive, imperative moment of creation, without beacon or frontier.

Christian Sorg, Los prados, suite n.8 , 2023 — Mixed media on canvas Courtesy de l’artiste © Musée de la Vallée de la Creuse

It has often been rightly said, and the artist himself confirms it, that Christian Sorg’s quest is that of painting, that the true motif is painting itself. A daunting challenge, whose victory is never definitive, for each canvas, each drawing, each project, is a reconquest. But this should not be confused with the principle of art for art’s sake, as it has been advocated in the past. For here, in the mysteries of abstraction, he undoubtedly includes many of the realities with which the artist works, composes and, above all, lives: the presence of nature, the influence of nearby areas, the particular circumstances of the moment and the importance of the human being, his feelings, impressions, attentions, emotions and thoughts. All his painting appears, in this circumstantial and momentary concentration, as the result of a composite chemical precipitate with unpredictable reactions. This is the magic of painting.

Each of the paintings in Los Prados reveals a finesse of stratifications, a plurality of thicknesses. Within this suite, the ascension of curves is felt, as is the truth of faults. Although they are never free of a possible “recognition”, subject to intimate transformations as a result of pictorial invention, these splinters of vegetation are above all obvious colors, these sinuous paths inscribed in the hills. These landscape materials “expressed” with brushstrokes and oil sticks are never abstract, though they are always removed from the sayable. We have the feeling that they proceed from much more than “a painter’s writing” on the surface of the world. Rather, we are walking through a world whose tonal heights are earthly heights.

Christian Sorg, Los prados, suite n.10, 2023 — Mixed media on canvas Courtesy de l’artiste © Musée de la Vallée de la Creuse

This world maps itself. It’s as if the artist, walking through the memory of these spaces through the grace of the painting, were showing us that living near these “Spanish meadows” makes the near and the far, the visible and the indistinct, the solid and the ethereal, equal in a welcome democracy.

The time at work in these canvases is multiple. It appears, as it were, through superimpositions. It moves in multiple directions. It’s a time we need to give ourselves to experience a temporality explored and unfolded in planes and depths of field — which are simply the gestures of painting.

The meadow unfolds in its double definition. It is both man-made (doubly so through the painter’s reading of it) and “restored” in its natural vacancy — as sensitively as in Christian Sorg’s other works, notably those born of the observation of rock faces on which parietal memory has been deposited. In ten paintings, ten times, Christian Sorg gives us his perception of the landscapes around the rocky promontory of the village of Calaceite. It is painting itself that circulates in all directions in these canvases, imposing its forms, elevations and vertigo.

Marc Blanchet Extract from the text “Los prados, les prairies aragonaises de Christian Sorg” (Los prados, the Aragonese meadows by Christian Sorg) reproduced in full in the exhibition catalog.