Luc Mabille: The Path

4/11/2023 - 10/12/2023

CAPS @ Oostende

Oosthelling 8, 8400 Oostende, Belgium

Luc MABILLE’s paintings tell us the story of a tragic, but discreet tale, of plant spaces with erased textures. Favoring for his palette either pigments with saturated frequencies or obscure intensities, the artist composes his wooded landscapes like clusters of vibrating atoms, whose chromatic ranges agglomerate in filmy refractions. Brilliant and diffuse swarming of pigmentary units with contrasting polarities.
Mabille paints the substantial imprint of evanescent bites of light and afflicts the negatives of these spaces with heaviness. Irradiated nature that challenges as much as it surprises; it is a luminescent contemplation for the gaze, but with bursts etching the retina with an imprint of ablaze nature.
The latter at MABILLE freezes in prismatic colorations of consciousness, in figurative jets cutting sharpness and everyday life, in ultimate flashes heralding the dissipation of existence and the beginning of memory. (...)
” The Conversation ” (a tribute to Lucas Cranach) is offered as an updated quotation from a famous work in the history of art; Cranach’s Adam and Eve (1528) presented itself as a diptych welcoming these opposing and complementary beings from the Garden of Eden. MABILLE here remodulates the canonical association, by metamorphosing the original couple into two trees with distant sensualities.
MABILLE thus moves the sacred to a new place, invites us to take a fresh look at a nature, sometimes invisible but essential, in which resides an unalterable truth. This nature in MABILLE is as much present as it escapes us; the vision we have of it can get blurred, and already appear to us only as a memory. The artist’s technique focuses on the saturation and metamorphosis of the plant motif by light. This painted nature that is presented to us, when we approach it, distorts, bursts, in a teeming abstraction of colored material.

(Pierre Hubeaux-Colon / galerie Chrisitine Colon / Luc Mabille about “the Conversation” painting’ )