FERNBERGER

Until December 2, Vicky Colombet is exhibiting her celestial paintings, between realism and abstraction, which capture the essence of natural landscapes on two floors at the Galerie Dutko.

/// Nora Djabbari

In 2020, the Musée Marmottan Monet invited Vicky Colombet for a visual discussion between her and Claude Monet entitled “Dialogues Inattendus – Peindre comme la Rivière”. She is back with her new exhibition “Eau et lumière” at the Galerie Dutko. Here, the artist explores our visual perception of nature and shows with her new series visions that continue to evoke impressionism. “ Monet brought me to the crossroads of minimalism and areas that I had not explored. His way of capturing the course of the day without ever freezing anything, his intrusive sun, supported by orange-reds in an absent horizon conducive to abstraction, pushed me to work with new pigments – purples and greens – with new shades and allowed me to enter another type of landscape ” she explains. 

The shards of a pond, the cottony material of clouds, the shimmering reflections of the sun on the ocean or slices of sky that reveal themselves in all their splendor… Vicky Colombet invites us into her pictorial poetry to contemplate her complex compositions. Here, large formats and small formats rub shoulders and seem to emerge from the depths of the seas or the heights of the mountains. Nature is inscribed even in the pigments, which she prepares and grinds herself.

Vicky Colombet is to painting what Virginia Woolf is to words. What unites her with this famous British writer is her assertive style, her exploration of traditional forms and her commitment to sharing pictorial experiences that go beyond understanding. The artist works on the notion of mental landscape with her oil wax works. Her canvases push the limits of abstraction, drawing us into floating natural universes thanks to a technique combining transparency, opacity and folds.

The exhibition reveals a new series of works, whose main color is blue. Royal blue, light blue, topaz blue shine in unison like jewels, reflecting the light on the white walls that host them. The canvases exhibited bear witness to meticulous work dedicated to the superpositions of textures and colors. By navigating between realism and abstraction, Vicky Colombet gives her work an aura of mystery, a palpable and ambiguous energy.