It is an the Andalousian garden in Martagina that he discovers the banana leaf. Durings many months, it is on the top of his preoccupations. With a pencil, followed by Indian ink brushed with a large paint-brush, sometimes enhanced with coloured chalk and declined over three hundred sheets, this is to say how this source of inspiration solicits the artist’s imaginary. Nonchalantly spread over the sheet of paper, the banana leaf takes little by little its comfort to occupy nearly the totality of the space of the support and inscribes itself, as the artist foreshadows it, as a link between sky and earth.
On a symbolic point of view, many beliefs gravitate around the banana tree. Among them, in the heart of the Hindu vision, the banana tree is the plant of the lost Paradise. For Buddha, it is the symbol of vanity, of wealth, of fragility and the instability of things, the aerial part of the tree disappearing after fructification.
Smoothly swinged by the oceanic winds, the climatic hazards, the unfurl of time, the banana leaf, like all the plants, buds, is developping, renewing itself, and is inscribing into the universal cycle and the order of things, with its part of dream, evasion, poetry, that the hand oft he artist translates with an undeniable talent and know how.
On the opposite, another part of the exhibition, constituted by large oil canvases, brings a breath of exuberant colours, an invitation to explore a world made altogether with material and light. Like a pitched battle of colours, a Daedalus of sharp edged polygons is covering the canvases. The geometric shapes are sometimes overlapping, going away, excluding themselves, exalting, to the limits of an equlibrium sometimes close to break down.
Poetry of the instant, nostalgia of imaginary or visited places, the works of Charles de Montaigu cross the time. Fruit of a long breath work, of halts, of sighs, sometimes of years of intervals, following the existential meanders of the artist, they keep their constant incisive freshness. So in the course of time, the work is not exactly the same, but not exactly another. In an unpredictable way, it lives in the present of the artist. To crown the exhibition, most of he exhibited works are illustrated into a magnificent Flatorello, with a head edition.
Charles de Montaigu lives and works in Laconnex near Geneva. Since 1973, he exhibits regularly in Switzerland, Europe and in the United States. Laureate of the “Bourse fédérale” of Fine Arts (1983). Award price of the Foundation for the Graphic Arts in Switzerland (1994). Acquisition and installation of Athys III (Iroko wood sculpture) in the Chicago Athaeneum Park at Schaumburg, Art under the Stars, Museum of Architecture and Design, Chicago. His works are included in many public and private international collections.
To come : realization and installation of Aarau 2021, sculpture made of Larch wood for the exhibition “The Swiss sculpture since 1945”, in the Aargauer Kunsthaus of Aarau from June 12 until September 26, 2021.
Flatorello available at the gallery : Sfr. 40.-; head edition : Sfr. 200.- with an original drawing of the artist.
On cover : Feuille de bananier, juillet 2019, mixed media, Indian ink, coloured chalk on paper, 64 x 48 cm ; Bleu soleil, 1995-2005, oil on canvas, 130 x 97 cm
Photographic crédit : Genoud entreprise d’arts graphiques SA
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