Albert Woda - originally from Nice, but who has lived in Reynès for more than 30 years - has been hailed a master of the sensual.
Inspired by Dutch painterly tradition, he favors a dark tonality, grounding his artworks in a palette of browns, blues, greys and golds to depict majestic skies stretching over infinite plains or to explore a more intimate geography: the human body.
The body as landscape and a contemplative moment of solitude are the starting point of this show's works. Woda’s subjects are captured in a state of true extension of the self into space.
Recurrent in all paintings and drawings is the sense of subtle mystery and melancholy - A kind of pleasantly lost world.
ARTIST STATEMENT
“An artist is someone who wipes the glass between us and the world with light, with a cloth soaked in silence.” (Christian Bobin)
As a child, I wanted to touch the light. Not that of the sun which is a brute and without finesse - try looking at the sun and you’ll lose your sight! - No, the light that I wanted to cup in my hands runs on the sea, lingers on the treetops, animates the gaze, caresses before we do the beloved, and yet we are not jealous because it is the light that discovered the beloved for us. I am interested in these wonderful reflections. The light shines on the earth, but my own shadow kept it at a distance.
So I had to use cunning, and take it by surprise, hiding myself in order to observe the enchantment it offers to the world. But as we know, light flies at unimaginable speed! Responding to my obsession, my mother bought me a flashlight, then my father took me to the Louvre ...
As a child, I understood that I should resign myself: we do not seize the light. Leave that to the angels. To get close to light I was first of all an etcher, which is to say a watcher of shadow and night. The engraving is handled in black ink. In the darkness the light flashed.
The glow of the paper plays cat and mouse with the ink I apply. Then I discovered Naples yellow, which is light itself contained in a tube, and in the paintings of Claude Gellée, Le Lorrain and Camille Corot.
Light tamed by the brush-mark needs the softest of touches (I use brushes made of skunk hair). If you make a comparison with the hands-on force needed to carve in copper plate, it is the difference between night and day...
To paint a picture, to grasp it, is to preserve the fleeting light of an instant that links us to the world. The instant when the painting gives its echoing flash is the instant I penetrate. I become the observer observed. Looking at my picture, it looks back at me. In the deep spaces of painting the light becomes tangible, it is a soul confiding to me a secret. - The eye with which God sees me is the eye through which I look at Him, as Meister Eckhart says. - Each of my paintings is an attempt to brush with infinity in its frequentations with light. By flooding the universe, light offers us immensity in the palm of our hand.
Albert Woda
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