Focusing on still lifes, parks, and landscapes, Alexandre P\u00e9pin\u2019s painting stands out for its vibrant touch, strikingly embodied in the present and in the senses. The rustling of dried-up flowers and herbs in the wind traverses the canvas with the same intuitive reality as the perfume of shrivelled, squeezed lemons imbues the space. The pictorial and symbolic cohabitation of elements and their perception thus oscillates between the transience of the material and the permanence of the image, between the vitality of the senses and the inertia of substances, or, more metaphorically, between life and death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

P\u00e9pin effectively captures the vitality of things otherwise unexpressed, particularly noteworthy in his treatment of plants. Under his sensual hand, the representation of cedar hedges or a hardware store greenhouse evoke settings in a Jane Austen novel. The medium lends the subject a timeless patina, amplified with a delicate energy that definitively separates the ordinary from its banality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The representation, unsettling due to P\u00e9pin\u2019s treatment of dew, is by no means hyper-realistic. The living is made manifest through the artist\u2019s touch and use of colour, expressed all the more eloquently in his more abstract explorations and arrangements of objects made of modelling clay. Evoking improbable cabinets of curiosity or extraterrestrial still lifes, the clay models, sometimes mixed with other found objects, facilitate an astonishing discovery of material through colour. P\u00e9pin manipulates contrasts and synergies to imitate life without pretence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, painting does not deny its state, but instead bears witness to an exceptional mastery of light as pictorial device. Light defines forms, translates textures, or obscures certain details. Here, we imagine an incandescent sun or an insistent flash; there, the image is revealed as though diffused behind stained glass. Depending on the scene, light is descriptive or perfectly evanescent, refocusing our attention on the ma- terial itself. Luminous vanitases<\/em>, P\u00e9pin\u2019s paintings highlight the common and capture its transience in order to expose the eternal vitality of the pictorial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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