Comme une respiration: Sylvain Ciavaldini

Sylvain Ciavaldini’s precise stroke meticulously sketches reality, using the light and shadows that compose it. Rather than using contours, he employs materials, transparencies and gradations of gray to reveal volumes. The artist then adds disruptive elements that act on the image, revealing details and giving rise to a new reality. His solo show at Galerie Sator presents a series of new paintings produced since 2022, which continue his aesthetic research into form while plunging into the abundance of a resilient nature.

Following in the footsteps of the painters who left their mark on art history, Sylvain Ciavaldini experiments with form. How is it generated? How can light reveal it? How do we connect it to its environment? In his previous series, contemporary geometric or fluid forms invaded the monuments of the Italian Renaissance (Les idoles series, 2016 and Rêve de monuments, 2015). In the new paintings presented at the gallery, they no longer populate landscapes, but instead dominate them. White lines cut through the paintings, like traces of light painting or fissures revealing the whiteness of the paper (Les Lumières du ciel, 2022). As luminous stains, they sparkle (Contre nature, 2022). Clouds of light extracted from a Van Gogh painting (La Nuit étoilée, 2022) or stars photographed in a time-lapse (Une Nuit sans fin, 2022), they become abstract motifs that nonetheless portray terrestrial movement. The surface motifs play with the subjects, blurring their perception.

Forms become motifs, and the represented subjects become substance. The artist plays with these inversions. He also experiments with the entanglement of images, as in La Grande fenêtre (2022). He fuses, assembles and superimposes seemingly disparate elements, and yet... the lines blend naturally, the exterior intertwines with the interior, white forms dissimulate, and colored ones penetrate the material. Another reality emerges. Sylvain performs a balancing act in search of harmony. He explores this fortuitous encounter, so dear to the surrealists who adopted Lautréamont’s famous phrase “Beau comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d’une machine à coudre et d’un parapluie” (Les Chants de Maldoror: “Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella”); and equally dear to the fans of serendipity, behind such major scientific discoveries as Alexander Fleming’s penicillin. The vitality and depth of his paintings are born of these encounters. Could there be a parallel with the vivid savagery of his art? The artist from Marseille who lives between Paris and the Lot region of France where he develops permacultural projects, draws the subjects of his new paintings from nature, whether living or dead, wild or invasive when it reclaims an abandoned greenhouse. Generous, intertwined forms offer themselves to the viewer. Until a certain tipping point when the eye approaches the painting, realizing that it’s made up of a multitude of juxtaposed blobs, like Impressionist works or pixels; where superimposed landscapes merge harmoniously; where the interior meets the exterior in a single breath. The space of breath is “the back-and-forth through which the outside and the inside not only communicate, but breathe each other in. (...) Breathing is therefore a permanent exchange with the outside, a sort of landscape conversation, an interview, a debate,” Marielle Macé wrote in Respire (2023). Sylvain Ciavaldini’s new works seem to arise from this respiration. Sylvain Ciavaldini’s new works seem to emerge from these breaths. The artist embraces the air of time. He breathes in landscapes, the arts, interiors imbued with the lives of their inhabitants, trees and plants. His dedication to the wild has set his work free. Assembling, layering and collaging, Sylvain Ciavaldini turns the encounter and wonder of nature’s inspiring and sublime beauty into an art form; a breath of fresh air.

Aude de Bourbon Parme