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05.03.2024 – 09.03.2024
Jörg Kratz & Dylan Williams /// Bright Night
elma.
Galerie Elsa Meunier & Galerie Mathilde Le Coz
15 rue Guénégaud
75006 Paris
Herzlich Einladung zur Ausstellung.
Eröffnung: Montag, 5. März 2024, 18:00 – 21:00 Uhr
Öffnungszeiten: 14:00 – 18:00 Uhr
After presenting several exhibitions together, gallery owners Elsa Meunier and Mathilde Le Coz are delighted to announce their association under elma collective. For its first exhibition, elma is proud to present ‚Bright Night‘: an exhibition bringing together the work of German and Welsh artists Jörg Kratz and Dylan Williams.
Both paint allusive landscapes, stripped, devoid of any human trace. With diffused lights, enveloped in restrained and sober palettes, their work carry the precious and fragile sparkles of a night inhabited by myths and legends – Jörg Kratz and Dylan Williams paint the mysteries of the evening light.
The two artists are the heirs of a particularly rich history of landscape painting in Germany and Great Britain, crushed in the 18th and 19th centuries by the masters of Romanticism, among them Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner. The romantic landscape detaches itself from the classical and meticulous representation of places, as well as allegory, to give free rein to the elevated expression of the sublime and the infinite. Nature becomes a mystical, exalted, bewitched place, a place to find oneself, experience oneself torments, splendours and terrors.
The uninhabited canvases of Jörg Kratz and Dylan Williams seem to produce a fairly similar phenomenon in those who look at the painting.
Both position us facing the landscapes of their pictorial windows. Without another character, the spectator necessarily becomes the subject of what he or she is watching. However, Jörg Kratz and Dylan Williams made a drastic change in format. Unlike their predecessors, they paint on small canvases – traditionally used for portraits – which encapsulate the immensity of the landscape they contain. The spectator, alone, facing a sovereign nature, then seems to look at his or her own interior landscape in a mirror. The addition of an element – a luminous star for Dylan Williams or a vanishing point for Jörg Kratz – draws us even more towards the interior of the painting: the introspective contemplation is intended to be total, immersive.
For Jörg Kratz, nature is sylvan and dense. In ‚second thundershower over‘ (2023), no one would be surprised to see amongst the greenery the white skin of a lost dryad. The touch is lively but heavy like the heavy foliage of a millennia-old forest. The light is sucked away. In comparison, the works of Dylan Williams are atmospheric, ethereal. With a delicate and vaporous brush, the artist suspends a silent sun in ‚Softly through darkness‘ (2023) – an astronomical preoccupation, also millennia-old, which agitated the peoples of megaliths. Here, the vibrant light is diluted. To Jörg Kratz’s movement of brushwood responds Dylan William’s transversal immobility, like a slight air stream.
Whether it is the glow of night in the mist of Dylan Williams or the moonlight muffled with foliage of Jörg Kratz, the artists of ‚Bright Night‘ offer us with their cryptic and wild landscapes a poetic vision of nature, a meditation on our states of mind, a sample of the sublime.
