Moon Rising in Daylight

Almine Rech Paris, Turenne
64 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris FR
October 18 — December 20 2025

If we say that painting is first and foremost covering a surface, this not only points to the obvious role of paint and

gesture—the sequence of actions, rhythms, and energy that flow through the body and that the body transmits—but it

also invites us to reverse our process of seeing. All the more so in the work of Christopher Le Brun, when layers of paint

accumulate and brushstrokes are placed—we might say deposited like sediment—over a long period of time before the

paintings leave the studio.

Viewing these paintings, we no longer look through the surface, seeking a depth that would extend from the foreground

to the background, as deeply as possible, but we roam over it, surveying this surface from top to bottom and from one

edge to the other, aware of its countless reliefs and variations or color shifts—the same way the painter experienced its

expanse by the scope and repetition of his gestures, the way he pushed back its boundaries by juxtaposing a varying

number of vertical panels, thus exploring its height as well as its length. Here, the horizon is found in the painting, giving

access to what the artist calls its hinterland: what sustains and grounds the painting, its multiple sources and things left

unsaid—the space from whose border the painting emerges, to which it is connected psychologically, culturally, or

metaphysically.

The geographical metaphor is not accidental: it compares the painting to an area of influence and attraction, inviting us

to think of it in terms of a space of exchange and not as a hierarchy, and indicating that what we do not see gives a

foundation and a meaning to what is found on the surface. The hinterland is where poet Yves Bonnefoy situated his

discovery and experience of Italian painting, which was inseparable from the place where he traveled and understood this

“synthesis of the being in the category of space” that is perspective, where he felt that “everything was explained,

everything was resolved in an inner, gentle irradiation—truly, a new degree of consciousness, a freedom that some minds

had released, directly it seemed, from perceptible experience.”

Seeing the moon rise in the sky in the middle of the day (Moon Rising in Daylight) or, on an autumn day, feeling the light

and heat of summer (Tracks in High Summer): the power of painting freely offers such surprises and shifts, allowing

viewers to experience the intensity of these sensations, both through itself and through what we can sense. Perhaps this

is the idea of Plato’s Summer, which Christopher Le Brun invites us to share: a world of ideas, which, although it is

abstract, we reach through our senses (like music, which Le Brun loves) and the site of a perception that is so real that it

clearly has no need for imitation and illusion. Through the hour of day and the seasons evoked by these paintings, time

itself is expressed here and inspires meditation—the time of cycles and returns; the time of variations in air and light

that have such a strong influence on our moods and function as metaphors for sentiments; time that is only seen in its

effects, just as the moon is in the sky much longer than we are able to perceive it.

Between meteorology and philosophy, between the perceptible present and metaphysical atemporality, there exists this

painting whose strength of attraction is inversely proportional to its degree of representation. This may recall a walk on

the beach under a starry sky that Piet Mondrian once connected to some of his first abstract compositions depicting

black crosses on a white field. These arrest our gaze the way stars do, stars that lead us to wander as much as they orient

us. And these compositions reveal the light inherent in painting, which the painter must create, tirelessly, brushstroke

after brushstroke, until it reaches the eyes of the viewers, suffused with gestures as much as with poetry, sending

timeless mysteries through the air.

— Guitemie Maldonado, art historian and critic

Almine Rech Paris, Turenne
64 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris FR

All enquiries: Almine Rech

Installation photography - Nicolas Brasseur
Work photography - Stephen White and Co.
Images copyright Christopher Le Brun, DACS 2025