Ingert - Charles-Élie Delprat | Quelques endroits de la terre et du ciel

Charles-Élie Delprat (born in 1987) is a travelling painter, and precisely a walking painter. He represents landscapes but also crosses them, roams them, lets them mold him. His landscapes, or rather his views, are pictures chosen by a gaze which, at a certain point, stops, held back by a light, attracted by a perspective. This gaze, whose presence and quest are immediately felt, has retained something of its initial training: the work of an architect who studies buildings and spaces, sketching them tirelessly to assimilate the laws of constructions and perspective. A meteorological dimension can also be seen: a meticulous attention paid to the quality of the light, to the sky and shadow tint, to the degree of dryness or humidity in the air. This apprehension of the world is the one of someone who confesses ‘a small guilty passion for clouds’, for a certain daydream, something more flowing and ethereal. The artist has a rigorous technique, using traditional mediums, as close as possible to craft, in order to understand and explore all the combinations and possibilities. This explains a particular attention paid to the choice of the paper and to the preparation of the backgrounds, which have become essential in his work. Charles-Élie Delprat talks about an ‘exploratory dimension’. Therefore, each work of art tends to become a spiritual exercise of the gaze, the emergence of a deep connection with a place. This often takes the form of a process of images transformation which, as they are reworked or remembered, change, intersect and come together to form a landscape with the intense reality of a memory, without being, strictly speaking, real. Uninhabited, this world may be seen without projecting any other affect than one’s in order to ‘confront it on site, without preexisting value judgment, and simply represent them as a component of the contemporary world’.

Picture: Charles-Élie Delprat
Le Petit Nice, bassin d'Arcachon — 2024
Fusain, pierre noire et pastel sur papiers teintés et collés
59,5 x 91 cm | 23.4 x 35.8 in.