Ombres Foliaires

First came the pines — familiar figures, regional culture, coastline. Then those other canvases, in bright, at times unnatural colours: foliage in iridescent tones, treated graphically so that it seems to radiate. Merged together, blocking out any horizon, the foliage is at once the subject and its own shadow. Camouflage in fragments, the marking-out of stems and trunks, never alike, sensitive to wind and light: their fragility and complexity fill the paintings.

Sébastien Mahon continues this intimate conversation with nature — an expression that resembles a correspondence about what binds us to it, and about our own straying. “Ombres foliaires” tells that mystery, a mixture of disturbance and calm.

In the manner of the Impressionists, he tries to catch the full intensity of light and the variability of colour. Mahon’s works are not conceived as series but as independent pieces on which techniques intermingle. It is a practice that requires “negotiating with incidence”, in the artist’s words: a process born of the tension between command of a set of skills and the letting-go inherent in them.

These landscapes also follow years of painting in France and in China, where he lived and returned to working on paper.

Text by Alice Martin for Zone Trois Galerie.