Christopher Le Brun — Almine Rech, Paris, Turenne
Christopher Le Brun approaches painting as a field of intensity where the impulse of gesture, the density of material, and the resonance of images converge. His work, nourished as much by art history as by sensory experience, progresses through patient layers, allowing an inner light to surface in each painting. For his first exhibition at Almine Rech Paris, Moon Rising in Daylight, the artist unveils a body of work that explores the subtle transitions between perception and abstraction, between seasonality, atmospheres, and states of mind. It is an invitation to let oneself be guided by the painting itself—by its vibration and its richness.
A rare opportunity in France to discover this body of work, which allows itself to be visited in turn by classicism, modernity, and the avant-garde, all under the constant guidance of light. Here, it is the intensity of traces, strokes, erasures, and masses that forms the driving force of demanding compositions whose abstraction tears through its own condition with a dynamic that never lets the gaze rest.
The light, pushed to its limits, circulates through unstable chromatic relationships. Le Brun seems to hold it back where it escapes, to mingle it when it bursts, giving the whole a spectacular dimension of a reflective order: not the representation of a phenomenon, but the act of its creation. As though slipping away from its subject and its status as a mere vector, the painting becomes the agent of this variation, far more lyrical than it first appear, overturning the weight of this moon to make imbalance the very engine of its paradoxical intensity. A reflection, in a sense, of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of perception, where vision, as an act, is itself a gesture of sensitive matter toward consciousness.
More than this, the work absorbs into its radiance the countless influences and unfathomable techniques accumulated by the artist, who invests appearances with a sublime depth through this moon linking all points of the globe (from Western sensibility to East Asian intuition). Far from leaving us at a distance through an esoteric “beyond-world” known only to himself, Le Brun encourages us, through the generosity of his stroke and the shared vulnerability of his feeling, to allow what he calls his “hinterland” to emerge.
Christopher Le Brun, Moon Rising in Daylight, from October 18 to December 20, Almine Rech, Paris Turenne, 64 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris. Open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am–7pm.
