1984 Le Gotteron series

Tree studies

This series presents the forest as convolutions, of displaced signs of force based on the book Flatland written in 1884 by Edwin Abbot about a universe where color and light are subject to an intuitive dreamlike logic. The leaves grow, seeming to embody generative force. I felt that I could eliminate the chaos that governs nature. A tenuous balancing act that results in the sort of vibration, banishes the material to expose the essence. These works suggest the impenetrable thicket, as in Roman mythology’s “antechamber of Hell” or later, Gothic approximations of a “woodland heaven.” Au commencement e’lait le verbe, the iconography has served virtually every religion. Trees rooted in the earth but reaching for the sky, morph into dense webs of arteries like the interior of the lungs. Even when still in the ground, trees link the quick and dead, the thrown shadows from the skeletal winter.

190. BLUISH DRIFTS OF AUTUMN

The symmetry of water to sky and land to water, ponders its necessity for survival. Isolated cypress, lend a reassuring solidity, while fruit bearing tree have an arthritic angularity. Landscapes acquire an unearthly character. A blue field evokes both birth and entombment picking up the theme of the social outsider.

192. WOODLAND CATHEDRALS

The common tempo of the strokes fuse the antagonistic parts, zoned by couplings of color along tilted and crossed axes. Trees bend away like fallen warriors, an allegory of the untamed force of nature and the end of history. A caged tension, improvised on a tree like form. “Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation.

189. QUAND, SOLENNELLEMENT, LE SOIR DES CHENES NOIRS TOMBERA

(When, solemnly, evening of black oak trees will fall)