Stoppenbach & Delestre is pleased to present 'Rhythm of lines and colours in French Avant-Garde', an exhibition including works by Charles-François Daubigny, Eugène Boudin, Armand Guillaumin, Hippolyte Petitjean, Louis Valtat, Henry Moret, Emile Bernard, Kees Von Dongen, Henri Manguin, and André Derain.
The exhibition investigates the visual language of imagination in paintings through the interplay of lines and colours. Throughout the early stage of modern art, the aggregation of forms and colourful textured surfaces, central to translate the sensation of the artist, embodied their ongoing pursuit of change and transformation in their approach of painting practices.
In his 1911 article 'Post-impressionism' published in The Fortnightly Review, Roger Fry states that 'Rhythm, [is] the fundamental and vital quality of painting, as of all the arts – representation is secondary to that, and must never encroach on the more ultimate and fundamental demands of rhythm.'The new research on the physiological role of colours ("Helmholtz's Treatise on Physiological Optic 1867") and their impact on human's perception have put in question the distinction between reality and imagination and opened new paths for artists. The research in neurology and psychology, such as in the field of consciousness led to new ideas concerning perception, which served to redefine the balance of forms, lines, strokes and colours towards more subjectivity. It further set new boundaries to the pictorial possibilities. Taking the evolution of rhythm and lines in painting as a point of departure, the exhibition retraces the development of perspective from academic art to the impressionist and post-impressionist painterly traditions. It explores the major shift from representational paintings to new forms of compositions, which reconsidered painting's nature, focusing on new pictorial languages revitalizing the rhythm of play between colours and structured designs.
The artists on view shared between them many of the same concerns for new forms of compositions that reflected a new modern outlook, symbolizing the blooming of new ideas that emerged in a great number of fields such as literature, art or philosophy.
