FX Combes — Entre-monde(s) — NextLevel Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 12 → July 21, 2012

For his second solo show, Entre-monde(s) in the gallery NextLevel, F.X. Combes presents a new series of images. Contining his work on the pictorial reflection on the limits of the photographic medium, the artist uses his reflexes as a painter to create compositions through a process based on photographic references. Through a misappropriation of light, he reconstructs an image: between real and virtual, between painting and photography, between shadow and light, Entre-monde(s).

Solid and imperturbable, the City seems fixed in its permanence. However, in its very immutability, all mass is subject to the transformations operated by light variations and by the inquisitive eye, seeking its quintessence. Taken at nighttime, the City’s looming light and volumes displace its photographic frame of reference; the line and grid of the realist narrative documentary form, fade and merge to reveal rippling colors that capture the inexpressible, the invisible. In becoming image rather than photo, the city escapes temporal reference and urban identification. It enters a realm of fiction and imagination whereby pictorial abstraction can evoke its essential meaning, its intermingled voids, interstices and pulsations. In this zone, where shadow meets light on a hard surface, matter seems to acquire a new density, softer, more fluid, and bearing the trace of urban vibrations. A different representational model of the City is thus proposed, capturing its fleeting moods and movements, elusive and unique. In the stillness of the architectural mass, the image taken to its ultimate abstract form provokes this necessary representational shift, to an almost extreme extent, becoming a composition of color blocks that pulsate and overlap. Lines, shapes and colors blur and transform the architectural grid, creating a floating interplay of subtle tones that reveal the deep interiority of the city in a timeless, almost mythical, dimension.