PARIS.- Almine Rech Paris, Turenne is presenting 'Moon Rising in Daylight,' Christopher Le Brun's first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from October 18 to December 20, 2025.
If we say that painting is first and foremost covering a surface, this not only points to the obvious role of paint and gesture—the sequence of actions, rhythms, and energy that flow through the body and that the body transmits—but it also invites us to reverse our process of seeing. All the more so in the work of Christopher Le Brun, when layers of paint accumulate and brushstrokes are placed—we might say deposited like sediment—over a long period of time before the paintings leave the studio.
Viewing these paintings, we no longer look through the surface, seeking a depth that would extend from the foreground to the background, as deeply as possible, but we roam over it, surveying this surface from top to bottom and from one edge to the other, aware of its countless reliefs and variations or color shifts—the same way the painter experienced its expanse by the scope and repetition of his gestures, the way he pushed back its boundaries by juxtaposing a varying number of vertical panels, thus exploring its height as well as its length. Here, the horizon is found in the painting, giving access to what the artist calls its hinterland:[1] what sustains and grounds the painting, its multiple sources and things left unsaid—the space from whose border the painting emerges, to which it is connected psychologically, culturally, or metaphysically.
The geographical metaphor is not accidental: it compares the painting to an area of influence and attraction, inviting us to think of it in terms of a space of exchange and not as a hierarchy, and indicating that what we do not see gives a foundation and a meaning to what is found on the surface. The hinterland is where poet Yves Bonnefoy situated his discovery and experience of Italian painting, which was inseparable from the place where he traveled and understood this “synthesis of the being in the category of space”[2] that is perspective, where he felt that “everything was explained, everything was resolved in an inner, gentle irradiation—truly, a new degree of consciousness, a freedom that some minds had released, directly it seemed, from perceptible experience.”[3]
Seeing the moon rise in the sky in the middle of the day (Moon Rising in Daylight) or, on an autumn day, feeling the light and heat of summer (Tracks in High Summer): the power of painting freely offers such surprises and shifts, allowing viewers to experience the intensity of these sensations, both through itself and through what we can sense. Perhaps this is the idea of Plato’s Summer, which Christopher Le Brun invites us to share: a world of ideas, which, although it is abstract, we reach through our senses (like music, which Le Brun loves) and the site of a perception that is so real that it clearly has no need for imitation and illusion. Through the hour of day and the seasons evoked by these paintings, time itself is expressed here and inspires meditation—the time of cycles and returns; the time of variations in air and light that have such a strong influence on our moods and function as metaphors for sentiments; time that is only seen in its effects, just as the moon is in the sky much longer than we are able to perceive it.
Between meteorology and philosophy, between the perceptible present and metaphysical atemporality, there exists this painting whose strength of attraction is inversely proportional to its degree of representation. This may recall a walk on the beach under a starry sky that Piet Mondrian once connected to some of his first abstract compositions depicting black crosses on a white field. These arrest our gaze the way stars do, stars that lead us to wander as much as they orient us. And these compositions reveal the light inherent in painting, which the painter must create, tirelessly, brushstroke after brushstroke, until it reaches the eyes of the viewers, suffused with gestures as much as with poetry, sending timeless mysteries through the air.
— Guitemie Maldonado, art historian and critic
[1] In geography, the German term hintergrund designates the continental area located inland from a coast or a river, and in terms of maritime transport, it refers to the continental inland area that a port supplies and from which it obtains the merchandise that it ships elsewhere.
[2] Yves Bonnefoy, L’Arrière-pays, Paris, Gallimard, 2003, p. 64.
[3] Ibid., p. 67.
