The Invention of Landscape

september 21 - october 29

painters:

Jean-François OUDRY - Gottfried SALZMANN            

Bernard THOMAS-ROUDEIX

sculptors:

Hideko MIYATA – Yukichi INOUE

The word landscape appeared on midst of 16th century to name a painted picture representing a piece of nature. By itself, Nature does not offer us any landscape. Our eye cuts out and chooses in it a part worthy of being represented or simply admired. Thereby, landscape, properly speaking, is always an invention. But may one assign it such limits? Between point of view and vanishing point, the watcher's gaze, sees an area stretched and limited by the horizon line. So may one define landscape? But may one assign it such limits? Romanticism, jostling the stance of objectivity, has already seen landscapes as reflecting the soul. The painters Jean-François Oudry, Gottfried Salzmann, Bernard Thomas Roudeix fend off always more those limits. The pictorial traditions are jostled. The city is invited into landscapes and combines multiple perspectives. Who is watching? What do we see? From where do we see? Each work questions our eyes and causes a visual adventure. So, the landscape is not only a point of view, but the possible starting point of a new experience. Then, will come as a counterpoint, Hideko Miyata's and Yukichi Inoue's sculptures. Yet, what else could be stranger to sculpture than the very notion of landscape? Its role is more to mark and inscribe landscape in space, in order to put space in tension and to make it exist as landscape. Miyata's marble signs, Inoue's small "Forests", by their presence, are intended to be part of the landscape rather than describing it.

 Jean-Francois OUDRY

J-F Oudry's landscapes are from nowhere. They fascinate us as if they were mirages. What one sees suddenly slips away. Forests, cliffs, rocks fade away and we remain in front of a pictorial texture. "... Traces and forms become as elements, composite fragments, sedimentation, texture. So there is a landscaped material " writes Jean-François Oudry. Thus, the landscape invents and structures itself to suit the intuition of the artist who, digging his imagination's folds and strata, invites us to an archaeological gaze.

Jean-François OUDRY Sans titre  huile sur toile 130x97cm

Gottfried SALZMANN

G.Salzmann’s watercolours always come from somewhere. His landscapes are a constant dialogue with Nature as its pattern. In urban areas, from New York to Paris, reflective surfaces, shop windows, wind-shields or car bonnets... are fields of endless experiences, creating infinite visual possibilities. Our gaze rises away slightly disoriented, the sky falls down, everything is distorted in the reflection of curved spaces. The laws of perspective become misleading. Walls and windows shake and vibrate in a luminous drunkenness. And paradoxically, watercolour magnifies this visual feast with a virtuosity and expressive force incomparable to any other.

Gottfried SALZMANN Reflet New-York aquarelle 35x60cm

Bernard THOMAS-ROUDEIX

Bernard THOMAS-ROUDEIX's landscapes come out of somewhere. All starts with Nature. But soon we are somewhere else, in a strange, extravagant universe. Each work is the stage of a small theatre where an enigma disguised as a landscape is performed. Without warning, Bernard THOMAS-ROUDEIX takes us from one side of the perspective to another, plunges us into the 3rd dimension, toward the depth of background and humorously using an abstract and purely plastic sign, recalls one's gaze at the foreground of the picture. Sometimes patches of raw materials, string, straw, cracks... seem to introduce a plus of reality, in this reinvented landscape. He ironically surveys landscape as other pictorial genres, still life, portrait, and scrupulously questions the reality of the world until he gets us lose in the maze of doubt.

Bernard THOMAS-ROUDEIX Beaumes de Venise aquarelle 2015 65,5x46cm

Hideko MIYATA

From the first glance, Hideko MIYATA’s compositions invite to contemplation. Three, five or seven carved marble blocks, cleverly arranged on a plane form a landscape. Empty and full, rough and smooth, angular and rounded are all oppositions that highlight our mind’s tension and encourage us to meditation. Small sculptures are not outdone. The simplicity and purity of their lines, the sumptuous marbles erect these pieces as "Micro-monuments" which cast a bright positive energy. At the heart of all Miyata’s work lies harmony of which she has the secret, as the alliance of force and delicacy.

Hideko MIYATA Un accès vers l'au-delà Burgundy stone 35x72x65cm

Yukichi INOUE

Inoue carves stone directly. Either coming from Volvic or Okinawa, stone is not for him an inert material. Stone has a spirit, a story that the sculptor has to reveal. "When I cleave the stone, revealing a side that has not seen light for thousands of years, I feel an emotion" ? He says. The work that is taking shape gradually perpetuates and extends this first emotion. The Volvic stone, black, hard, austere... is loaded with telluric forces that have inhabited this land of Auvergne in time immemorial. With "Forests", (already shown at the exhibition "Inner Landscapes") and "Little Black Forests" that we present today, the artist awakens these forces slumbering in the stone, as he awakens the memory of the mankind folly with the series ”1001 heads " carved in white hard Okinawa stone.

Yukichi INOUE Pyramide Petite ébauche II  Volvic lava 17,5 x 28,5 x 8,5cm

BIOGRAPHIES

Jean-François OUDRY

Born 26 May 1957. He graduated from the National School of Applied Arts (Duperré) in Graphic Arts. Between 1987 and 1989 he studied at the Casa Velázquez from which he graduated. In 1990, on his return from Madrid, Jean-François OUDRY inaugurates his pictorial work on landscape. Recent solo exhibitions: Galerie de l' Europe (Paris) - Felli Gallery (Paris) Commanderie des Templiers (Elancourt) - La Tannerie (Houdan) - Galerie Le Corbusier (Trappes)

Gottfried SALZMANN

Austrian painter, born 26 February 1943 in Saalfelden, near Salzburg in Austria. He lives and works in France since 1965. Salzmann studied from 1963 to 1965 at the School of Fine Arts in Vienna and from 1965 to 1968 at the School of Beaux-Arts in Paris. He paints in watercolour and is also a draftsman, printmaker and photographer. He has had many personal exhibitions in Europe, U.S.A., Philippines, Japan. Works in public collections: the Albertina Museum in Vienna - Museum of Modern Art Salzburg Rupertinium - Museum Carolino Augusteum Salzburg - Oberösterreichisches Landesmuseum Linz - Essl Collection in Klosterneuburg, Vienna - Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris - National Library of France - Museum of Seoul - Jenisch Museum of the City of Vevey - Liechtenstein Art Museum - Metropolitan Museum of Manila. G. Salzmann is permanently at the Galerie ART aujourd'hui.

Bernard THOMAS-ROUDEIX

Born 1942. Education: National School of Fine Arts in Paris. Lives and works in Paris. Numerous solo exhibitions in France and abroad including: -Galerie ART aujourd'hui, "Disfigurements", May-June 2013 - galleries: Messina - Peinture fraîche - Art and Heritage - Sèvres (92): galeie du SEL - U.S.A., Ann Arbor: The Minotaur-art gallery - Luxembourg, Rodange, Duplex Gallery ... Numerous group exhibitions including exhibitions: Mac 2000-May -109 - Comparisons - Autumn - ArtMetz - Puls'Art .... Public Collections: Hotel Department, Rouen. Illustrations in various publications and collections of poetry. Price of the Taylor Foundation (June 2012) Permanently: Galerie ART aujourd'hui (Paris), Galerie Peinture Fraîche (Paris), Galerie SIRENADE (Dinan).

Hideko MIYATA

Hideko Miyata was born and raised in Japan, where she studied philosophy, then drawing and sculpture at the Institute of Fine Arts in Kyoto. Arrived in France in 1970, she continued her sculptor training at the National School of Fine Arts (Paris), where she met Yukichi Inoue, who became her husband. With him she has worked since 1984 in the sculpture studio of the Municipal School of Plastic Arts of Élancourt (78). Member of the association Regard Paroles since 1985. Regular participation in major national salons. Recent solo exhibition: Galerie de la Ferme du Mousseau, Élancourt (78), 2016. Participation in international sculpture symposiums; orders and sculptures achievements to several cities in France and abroad

Yukichi INOUE

Yukichi Inoue was born in Japan in 1942. He arrived in France in 1966, where he joined the National School of Fine Arts in Paris. There he was the student of H.G Adam and R. Collamarini, and met his future wife, Hideko Miyata. Both practised direct carving. He teaches sculpture at the Municipal School of Plastic Arts of Élancourt. From 1972 to 2007 he made 214 collective and personal exhibitions and produced 21 monumental sculptures in stone, in France and abroad. He works mainly with stone in direct carving. Member of the association Regard Parole. Price of the Coubertin Foundation in Salon de Mai, Paris, 2001 and 2011. Gianadda Foundation Award (Academy of Fine Arts) 2011. Simone and Cino del Duca Foundation Award ( Academy of Fine Arts, 2014 for all his work)

Photo report of the exhibition

 Video film of the exhibition

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NB: Please, notice that the exhibition is prolongated untill november 5 .