Ciel de nuit, 2017

Frédéric Choisel  

Survey the skies
These are skies seen from the earth, seen from men, seen from the solitude of the artist who stands, romantically, in front of immense nature.
These skies that exasperate the palette of the colorist, how to paint the changing color? How to make visible the infinite color chart of this world overlooking us?
Reduce the palette and make the yellows, blues and reds dance like the Impressionist masters? Or get carried away in a synesthetic delirium where each color is a note, where each note is a cloud?

Or, trying to penetrate into the material of the sky to flush out its evanescent color, the colorful invisible, like the Classics in search of the “colour-mood”?
In the works of the painter Frédéric Choisel, we grasp by sight the moods of a sky of intangible essence: ocher, orange, bladder green, purple, umber and bilious black. The clouds in their epiphanic nimbus speak as an oracle. Their messages are good or bad omen depending on whether the sky is clear or threatening.

When the sky is charged, it is akin to apocalyptic visions of times past or to come. Everywhere, an arid nudity, dark expanses advancing towards a horizon from which there is no Jerusalem. A tarred carcass emerges from brackish water as the last remnant of human life.
This "disquiet" that vibrates in several of the artist's canvases translates the fear of a god or of a nature that has the power to annihilate everything, thus leaving us in front of the
hallucinating spectacle of a mauve sky.

There are also canvases that strike by their very different aesthetics. The painter who oscillates between figurative art and abstract art, reconciles forms using different techniques: brush and oil paint for the skies, knife and tar for the land forms. The abstract gesture taints the canvas, tames the clouds with its multiple assaults, covers the purity of the sky with mire and brambles. These operations mutilate and hybridize the works which de facto are part of the discursive and reflexive field of contemporary painting.
Finally what we perceive is that behind the enterprise of painting skies hides an initiation into mystery, a conquest or a reconquest of the gesture of painting, a desire to probe the skies to better understand life. on earth.
Victoria Konetzki