INGERT

Charles-Élie Delprat depicts landscapes. He depicts them, but also moves through them, surveys them, allows himself to be shaped by them. Valleys, streets, airports; buildings, clouds, fields. Landscapes that might better be called views: images selected by a gaze that settles on things and, at a certain moment, stops—held by a light, drawn by a perspective. Like fragments of the world, very precisely framed excerpts where a landscape reveals a part of its essence while at the same time presenting itself as a pure motif, an arrangement of volumes and colors.

This gaze, whose presence and searching quality are immediately felt, has retained something of its initial training: that of an architect and landscape designer who studies buildings and spaces, sketching them tirelessly in order to appropriate their laws of construction and perspective. One can also discern a dimension that could be described as meteorological: a very meticulous attention to the quality of light, to the tint of the sky and of shadows, to the degree of dryness or humidity in the air—elements approached with equal precision, but in which one can also read an inclination toward a certain reverie, toward something more fluid and ethereal. This meteorological apprehension of the world is that of someone who confesses “a small, somewhat unavowable passion for clouds.” It is also, more simply, that of a painter who develops his gaze and his practice outdoors, from life, with all the technical implications that this entails.

Indeed, Charles-Élie Delprat is a traveling painter, and more precisely a walking painter. Spending a large part of his time on the road, from the Cantal to Italy, from Spain to Uganda, he is accompanied by notebooks that become the place of origin and first elaboration of his works. Making them himself, he turns them into a kind of portable studio which, through the constraints it imposes, dictates both a way of approaching places and a way of painting, characterized by liveliness and economy of means, delicacy and suddenness. Hence a taste for drawings laid down “in broad strokes,” for watercolors deployed “in generous washes,” which he also admires in the notebooks of masters: Théodore Rousseau, Turner, Poussin, Claude Lorrain or Corot. Hence also a very particular care given to the choice of paper and to the preparation of grounds, which have become determining in his work.

Charles-Élie Delprat possesses a rigorous technique, employing the most traditional media (ink, watercolor, gouache, printmaking, pencil, pigments) while committing, in an approach that seeks to remain as close as possible to craftsmanship, to mastering and exploring all their combinations and possibilities. This is evident in his recent series devoted to the landscapes of Castile or to the streets of Naples, drawn in black chalk and chalk on assembled sheets of paper that have been previously colored, then cut and mounted onto thick paper.

Charles-Élie Delprat speaks of his work in terms of an “exploratory dimension.” This concerns both his technical experiments and his journey, at once geographical and intellectual, through the landscapes that matter to him: “At the beginning of each new notebook there is a travel project. The accumulation of pages produces a drawn narrative of explorations of territories as much as of personal wanderings.” Each page and each work thus tends to become like a spiritual exercise of the gaze, a relationship that is formed and deepened with a place, a way of responding to the fascination aroused by a mountain, a light on a façade or a certain green at the end of a street. This often translates into a process of transformation of images, which, when reworked or recalled, are modified, intersect, and come together to form a landscape that, while no longer strictly real, has the intense reality of an atmosphere, a memory or a dream.

From these works there indeed emerges something like a melancholy, no doubt heightened by the absence of any human figure, which gives those who look at them one after another the impression of a deserted, depopulated world. And yet, far from any nostalgia, the world that is presented is absolutely contemporary, made up of roads, air travel, and immutable valleys. Rather than depopulated, one might speak of a disengaged world: disengaged by a gaze that seeks to undo the obviousness that binds us to it, to look at it without projecting onto it any affect other than its own singular one, in order, before a sky or a cement factory, to “confront it on site, without any a priori value judgment, and simply represent it as one of the things that make up the contemporary world.” 

Diego Rivero