LE NALBAUT

Gérard Le Nalbaut’s works demonstrate a solid pictorial will that results in a learnedly orchestrated style.

Each painting is conceived and constructes drom precise criteria that the painter imposes on himself and that allow him all the creative impulses that may crop up during the production.

These initial choices determine a colourful of the painted canvas interpel and recreate each other, masterfully avoideing, what could easely amount to monotonous juxtaposition. The rigor of the architectural structre of his characters is unimpeachable.

What appear to be constraints fall to lock him into impotence ; on the contrary, they propel him toward a lyriscism equalled only by the freedom of his execution.

The artist’s extremely elaborate technique allows him to take immense chances, but without ever falling into outrageous excess.

It allows his touch to loosen, gesture to take wing and his palette to flourish, for an invisible grid backs him up in even the most daring of escapades. But his essential choice, the one that appeals to us the most, is his decision to leave his worrien faceless. He thus create a contrast between figurative and abstract, provoking a feeling of mystery full of exorcism that fires the imagination.

The far-off lands he evokes, such as in “The Insular Life” or “The Ruby Garden”, are, in fact, fictional reality. Even if we find familiar landmarks in thes new canvas, such as animals, cars or plants – they all seem to belang to a nameless landscape befitting the absent expressions of the unknown women. Aluxurious poetry emanates from the works of Le Nalbaut, leading us to reduscover our most secret dreams, the way to our wildest hopes.

Lucie Baillancourt

“Univers des arts”

If for Beaudelaire the human soul is a governed by twoo principeles, won which uplifts it, the other dragging it down towards melancholy, Le Nalbaut, with unseen hands, has purged all the mal from his fleurs, and against the duality of our interior garden, he gives is the roses without the thorns. With a centrifugal jubilation which emanates from his being and his brush strokes, he has committed the paradox of” fleurs du bien” and makes us believe for a moment that only happiness exists. In his “chromatic flashes”, this colour pyromaniac tears apart our misty existences, burns or cold stiffness, and our erogenous eyes watches up take its course in this fire of consent. Far from the serious greyness of our worlds of affairs he rescues the

“invincible summer” whose custodian is woman. Under the weightless air of parasols on terraces where “moment linger, charged with indifference”, his feminine shadows give out the fascinating gentleness of the baroque cafés of turn-of-the century grand hotels. Noble attitudes surprised in a market place or at tea time from the noiseless movements of a high fashion ballet.

Le Nalbaut has exoticism in his buttonhole and classicism in his heart. The happiness of bright colours and suggested forms is evident here, but without a trace of vulgarity. This is the reason for the oxymoric success of the painter who has found the secret of combining opposites. His canvases strike the senses and the heart with a gloved fist, with the gentle violence that unites elegance and brutality, reserve with vivacity, femininity with virility.

His girls in bloom, “cut à la Chanel” haunt his imaginary tropics. His interior botany is sensual and wide but reject heaviness. The general rounding of people and things, the generous curves of his plants, the gave of the headgear, the movement of the dresses, all suggest pleasure without shame, without tricks, without pain. He gums faces in order to capture expressions more faithfully, distributes sublime hats which sing nostalgically of taking pleasure in the ephemeral architectures of the moment when life finally takes time to have time.

He propose an original distribution of “flat” volumes which structure and ennoble the whole, mingling with unknown shapes which tempt us like forbidden fruits. His seascapes foam with the ghosts of desires, in a powerful but light gesture which escapes from the canvas.

Something eternally young comes out of his painting Doubtless this is love, the humble purpose of one who does not refuse the world proudly out of abstract intellectualism, but plunges into it with suavity. Doubtless this radiance stems from the sincerity of the man, from the authenticity of his artist’s journey which saw the exigencies of this art come to light in the school of life.

Jean-Pierre Chopin