Louis Gagez

First, there is the matter. Paint in large layers in the heart of which the dream takes shape, casually, without seeming to touch it. Undoubtedly, in the secrecy of Louis Gsez's studio, we can already distinguish the beginnings of the work to be varnished. But nothing is over yet, nothing is needed. Then the artist sands, scratches, lets the paint flow, causes folds, reliefs, as some gigantic movement of the ground would do on earth. Then, little by little, poetry appears, evocative forms, shards of landscape, brief escapes of light. There the future of the painting is played out, in this colorful genesis, still indistinct, perhaps hazy. “I like to treat the material with gluttony, its contact, its smell, its slowness of execution, which gives the eye time to consider the rest. »Writes Louis Gsez, who by a peaceful path reaches the ultimate moment when the painting is revealed, where nothing must be touched, where the landscape takes the gaze towards deep skies, in the heart of which the blue multiplies, sings and is disenchanted, resonates like the sonorous echo of something beyond us. Far from the vain animation of the world, as he likes to repeat, Louis Ggez creates the substances of a waking dream, where beauty is not an empty word. His skies, his landscapes, his clean horizon lines, illuminate his work and make us fall into timeless visions. As Joseph Assouline notes: “Superimposed, scraped and sanded layers ultimately form an epidermis on the surface of the support. A skin which testifies in all its transparencies, furrows, crevices, of the depth of lived time of painting which has become the status of being breathing: the landscape lives ”. Indeed, the first specificity of the work of the young painter from Abbeville is to make the landscape quiver with life, flush with the canvas animated by interior jolts, as if traversed by some underground source of which we will never have the secret. The technical mastery of this work in the confessions of abstraction and figuration gives it a rare pleasure, something of the order of jubilation. To observe one of these paintings is to accept for a few moments to let yourself be carried away by a light wind, far from the turpitudes of our down-to-earth lives, it is to give poetry a chance, it is to take silence better part, that which sounds of wonder. - Ludovic Duhamel