Christian Sorg — Surgissements — DUTKO / Ile St. Louis Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 20 → April 3, 2021

Galerie Dutko is pleased to present from February 20 to April 3 an exhibition of works by French painter Christian Sorg (born in 1941). This is the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery. Eleven paintings will be presented, ranging from 1986 to the most recent works. A text by the writer and photographer Marc Blanchet, author of several essays on painting, will accompany this exhibition.

Christian Sorg has been interested from his earliest childhood in the professional activity of his grandfather, a photographer: the face-to-face distance with the photographed model, his presence in space, the passage from shadow to light mark him dee- ply. His training begins in the Applied Arts, by the choice of the sculpture workshop, requiring an essential mastery of drawing. Then the École Nationale des Beaux-arts in Paris, where he still draws a lot, assiduously frequenting the drawing cabinet of the Louvre, in contact with the works of his masters: Rembrandt and Poussin, among others, Goya, Velasquez and El Greco too, at the Prado in Madrid, which he also attends (and where he will take up residence — Casa Velasquez — .

Christian Sorg was part of a very special moment in the history of painting in France, that of the refoundation of abstraction by the return to the essential elements of the painting. Covering a surface with color, dividing it to work the space, inscribing a trace, he confronts it like the painters of his generation — especially Supports/Surface — , but refuses any system. Yet as early as 1977, as Christian Sorg indicates in an interview with Marcelin Pleynet — exhibition Cahiers d’Art, Paris — “what escapes on the sides of the canvas makes it impossible to read the surface as an absolute plane”.

In his works, the color is bubbling, the gesture ample, free and generous, but far from any expressionism. The object is motif, theme. The pictorial space which restores Sorg is a visual chaos but it is already the chaos of the Real. “Sorg does not capture the line but the lines, reinforced lines. He empties the motive or on the contrary saturates it to reach in both cases an absolute which is the matter, the space, the sign.” — Hubert Lucot — .

By refusing the ready-made methods, to account for the Real — cubist grids, new post-war figuration, etc. — , he still has to invent his method. It so happens that his installation in 1992 in Calaceite in Spain will put him in a position to give a foundation to this objective. For there is a before and after his discovery of Calaceite. The painter spends much of his time walking, observing, getting lost, getting caught up in a whole bunch of real stimuli — well rooted — that trigger a creative response, in a deeply felt impulse.

“In the work that is done and undone, is erased, reconstructed, a writing is born — transcriptions, traces, drawings, calligraphic cap- ture — that makes the totality of what is painted vibrate. Totality set up by taking risks and deepening. This is what makes innovation in Christian Sorg’s painting, through this type of inscription by being situated in the field of experience, of the possible. Painting as an act of presence.”

François Jeune

Christian Sorg is a voice of today who reconnects with the most distant echoes. From the lived experience, physically tested, he draws, paints, traces and transposes on the canvas the presence of the works of humanity of the first days, the fragility of the world and the envi- ronment, the ephemeral brightness of life.