Denis Castellas

About

These paintings belong to an ensemble originating from a photograph showing P Cezanne in nature in painter's attire. The image, is one of a man walking and looking, and at the same time the picture of a land surveyor. In some paintings he is confronted to its imaginary colored shadows while in others (often unstretched canvases) the figure floats in an undetermined space.

This series echoes in a distant but precise way another series painted in 2012 and presented at the Ceysson Bénétière gallery in Geneva in 2013. These paintings started from the reproduction found in an auction catalog of the cover of an edition of “Lyrical Ballads” by the English poet W. Wordsworth (1770-1850).

“Ballad” evokes to the French speaker, both the song ("balade") and a stroll ("ballade").
Ballade et balade : in French a song can be a walk.

Here, painting is both a walk in the world and a song of the world in which the artist, obstinately follows, its unknown path like a minuscule agitated particle. The story tells that Cezanne worked until his last breath. Joseph Beuys liked to compare Blinky Palermo’s paintings to breaths. Breath is what links walking to singing and suspends Cezanne’s apples in a space that challenges gravity.