Marc Nerbonne

The eye admiring Marc Nerbonne’s paintings is immediately immersed in peace. It also feels a tension originating from a concentration of masses contrasting with the softness of the tones, the mellowness of light and shadow and the velvety aspect of skies, where the horizon line joins, yet separates, two distinct dimensions intimately linked in a single stroke. Marc Nerbonne’s highly atmospheric post modern landscapes show an urban life where emanate, all at once, almost aerial lightness and an industrial density. All as if he was creating a visual testimony of the actual state of abundance, mastery and genius, but also of excess, emptiness and agony of our planet, where an immense beauty still persists despite of a vast human intervention mainly centered on itself. In his smoky and deserted constructions, life is perceptible only by the shapes of a well structured city that is suggested by geometrical agglomerations made with a palette knife, without any breath or beat to animate these, in a worrying immobility peculiar to places that may have suffered their ultimate disaster. But may it be also the indefinable calmness that precedes the outbreak, the latter being on the edge of bursting? Lost heaven, new world or promise land? Is it too early or too late? His unique pictorial ambiances provoke a personal questioning by proposing a vision of our environment both sublime and dramatic, like a trail bordering a precipice offers an astonishing panorama where extremes of danger and absolute share the same ground. The emotive charge is powerful, strongly based on this infinite and almost timeless space which, despite its fictive nature, calls out to memory as if it was remembering a known area. The hazy effect surrounding all of his work with an ethereal, not to say almost unreal aspect, contributes to this sensation of strangeness that of a futurist soul, without any permanent or stable marks, ties up to a reality quite concrete yet in transitory periods seeming suspended, hesitating between night and day. The elements of the composition allow detecting natural systems which can come as much from a cosmos fragment than from a water surface, submitted to a precocious or late luminosity, sitting within the realms of a double possibility, making a way through abstraction and figurative style. His sober palette is composed with hushed tonality. It is supporting a frontier game that hesitates between reality and fiction, according to logical and pure work, placing difference and contradiction in the center of the artist’s approach.

Lisanne Letellier