Despite their dense materiality, Brice Guilbert’s paintings also have a lightness that exudes from their softly-toned surfaces.
In the volcano’s shadow
Working in video, installation, drawing, music and painting, Guilbert’s earlier practice focused on pure geometry with a minimal palette.
Since around 2016, his began to repeatedly paint the same view of the volcano that backgrounded his childhood home. The representations of Piton de la Fournaise are iterated in a variety of colours and scales and on different supports. He initially painted on torn pages from Le Dessin Français au XIXe Siècle, an anthology of French 19th century painters.
In his Fournez series (2021) (the local name for Piton de la Fournaise), Guilbert’s use of colour takes on the hazy technicolour quality of Monet’s palette. Dense impasto strokes radiate from a shadowy volcanic tip, with the volcano’s eruption transformed into an abstracted burst of light. The ambiguity of Guilbert’s imagery is built through accumulated layers of gestures and materials. He paints with a heat gun and homemade oil bars, warming the hard paint to a more malleable texture. These densely packed, radiant marks mirror the process of magma seeping through fissures, before hardening into basalt striations.
Lyrical abstraction
These volcano paintings are often presented with Guilbert’s music and video works, collectively attempting to capture memories of the volcanic landscapes of his childhood. Guilbert likens these meditative repetitions to his musical practice, applying paint as if he were ‘strumming chords in a long melody’.
The artist’s music is also impacted by his roots, with his album Firinga (2015) appropriating the traditional maloya style of folk music on Réunion Island. Atmospheric guitar and soft vocals create a hazy, ambient sound that works in dialogue with Guilbert’s similarly obscure paintings, echoing a nostalgic yet imperfect reminiscence of home.
