Solo show
Opening
Saturday 18 January 2025
From 18 January to 8 March 2025, Galerie La Forest Divonne Bruxelles presents a solo exhibition by Patrice Giorda in its new space at 130 Avenue Louise.
‘It all started with photos I found in the studio, almost by chance. I took them over twenty years ago in the Parc de la Tête d’Or in Lyon. I’d tried to do something with them, but they didn’t seem to be charged with anything other than what they represented: paths in a park, trees, a lake… As I’m not a landscape painter in the sense that it would be the beauty of nature that would trigger the act of painting for me, I’d abandoned them.
I used to go there as a child with my parents; later I introduced my son to the park and I used to walk there very often, it’s magnificent. But the beauty of the place and the memories attached to it weren’t enough to trigger a change of heart.
I have no idea what it takes for a desire to trigger an act, the brain is so complex, but in the summer of 2023 I found these photos and it was obvious: Those red sandy paths after the rain, the emerald depths of the cedars, the blue skies, the intense yellows of autumn ceased to be landscapes and became nothing more than energies of colour that assaulted me and ordered me to move forward in their guts until I realised that I was moving forward within myself and becoming nothing more than a call to paint.
I painted like that for about eight months; then, one day, ideas came to me for new compositions, still about paradise lost but with an imaginative element, and I knew that was the end of it, that if I heard ideas it was because I’d lost the strength that had driven me all those months. I had painted instinctively, without any preconceived ideas. I had just crossed these territories and I had come out of them.’ Patrice Giorda
Inaugural exhibition: Patrice Giorda, “Le Paradis perdu”
On view from January 18 to March 8, 2025
Vernissage, Saturday January 18, 4pm – 7pm
Special opening, Sunday January 19, 11am – 6pm
