Rendered in oil paint and pure pigment, Paul de Flers' landscape paintings reflect a concern with the play of light and colour and convey a sense of stillness.
Read MoreCommon subjects in de Flers' paintings include bathers and frolicking human figures as well as animals in the woods, evoking the work of French Post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, among others. De Flers favours saturated colours and wide, long brush strokes, painting from spots of pigment that have been applied to the canvas at random.
A quality of suspended air and humidity permeates de Flers' artworks, as seen in the horizontal canvas La Battue (2017), in which the green of the trees and the lawn have been rendered in a seemingly single expanse of colour. Several figures and a dog stand near the periphery of the ground, their verticality and shadows being the only interruptions in the otherwise smooth field of green.
In Green Street, his 2021 solo exhibition at Almine Rech, Paris, Turenne, de Flers presented imaginary landscapes at different times of the day with an attention to light and transparency. The mixture of dark blue and green of the trees in Untitled (2020–2021) contrast with the pale blue of the sky, while tinges of orange and pink add warmth to the greenery; in another untitled painting from the same period, the reflection in the water is nearly identical as the scene above the horizon.
Alongside the artist's oil paintings, Green Street also showed small votive offerings from Mexico. Painted on thin metal sheets, these objects depict scenes of belief—miracles and dangers—that resonate with the transmutability of de Fler's subjects, in which wild animals almost resemble human forms and bathers become still to the point of blending into their surroundings.
Selected solo exhibitions of Paul de Fler's work include Green Street, Almine Rech, Rue de Turenne, Paris (2021); Penha de França, Boa Lab Gallery, Lisbon (2020); Animali Notturni, Galerie Perpitch & Bringand, Paris (2019); Une Traversée sans histoire, CRAG gallery, Turin (2018); Outro lugar, Armazém da Cultura, Fortaleza, Brazil (2016); and A luce spenta, Galerie Lefor Openo, Paris (2015).
Selected group exhibitions include Salon de Peinture, Almine Rech, New York (2021); Nos Armes, Galerie Perpitch & Bringand, Paris (2018); and Vis-à-vis, curated by Gallery Institut français Milano, Italy (2016).
Paul de Flers' Instagram can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021
