Vicky Colombet — Eau et lumière — Dutko / Quai Voltaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 26 → December 2, 2023

Galerie Dutko presents the recent works of Franco-American artist Vicky Colombet from October 26th to December 2nd. This third solo show brings together around the concept of “apparition” about fifteen paintings created in 2023.

A pond in the Hudson Valley, an early morning point, a blue sun, a glowing summer… Vicky Colombet’s works, presented at Galerie Dutko, immerse themselves in the paths that nature draws. Inviting light, materials, and the energy of the landscape to guide and shape her canvas, the artist embraces the rhythms of time, exploring in the studio the natural abstractions of life that write the moment. Here, the motif is not the landscape that painters have long taken as their subject, but the means and the opportunity to immerse oneself in it, to explore, outside the body, the sensations it creates, the discreet but evident resonances it induces. No horizon, no perspective, no escape. Vicky Colombet neither describes nor depicts. Her painting dissolves the motif to capture its tiny essence and powerful magnitude. The canvas itself becomes nature and landscape, like a metaphor for the earth, both terrestrial, celestial, living, and fragile.

Inscribed in an abstract, metaphorical, and philosophical expression of the landscape, Vicky Colombet’s works summon techniques that combine the legacies of the history of painting (from the quattrocento for pigment work) and Impressionism (for the juxtaposition of colors). The artist, using the canvas as an allegorical vector, plays with materials and fluidities (wax, oil), roughness, softness, and accidents (abrasions, smoothening…), alluding to the elements of nature and their space, like the breath of the wind, the weightlessness of clouds, transparencies, and the shimmering of water. In her creative process, allowing her to evoke without describing, Vicky Colombet combines the use of pebbles to soften or stretch the surface of the canvas, which she folds, roughens, or flattens in places. Her colorism, based on a radical and meticulous work of pigments—crushed, mixed, brushed—allowing their brilliance and light to emerge, signs her touch and her commitment to an approach to nature studied over a long period through the traditions of painting, from Chinese calligraphy to abstract expressionism.

The works presented at Galerie Dutko mark a new stage in the artist’s journey of contemplative and awe-inspired exploration of the living, its essence, its movement, its simplicity. Nourished by a fruitful dialogue conducted over four years with the works of Claude Monet, Vicky Colombet’s recent landscape paintings declaim the alchemical poetry of a nature-world contained in the timeless and ephemeral moment.

Christophe Averty