FERNBERGER

Fernberger is pleased to present Flying Back Home, an exhibition of new paintings by Vicky Colombet. This exhibition marks the first solo presentation of Colombet’s work on the West Coast, and brings together some of her largest and most formally complex works to date., Colombet worked on this show with a palette exclusively of varying blues and blacks, all while closely embracing negative, or open, space in her compositions.

These works are a continuation of a body of work Colombet began in 2015 entitled Pils et Paysage ("Folds and Landscape") that has been defined by mono- and bi-chromatic paintings on linen canvas. The specific framing for this exhibition, including its title, has been drawn from the vistas during her many flights across the Atlantic "Flying Back Home" from Paris to New York and vice versa. The unfolding and folding movement of the sea, the fracture of the coast lines, how the world she gazed down upon seemed and could be summarized as "Plis et Paysage". Colombet has said of her paintings, which are decidedly abstract, that they are not "of a landscape", but rather that they themselves constitute landscapes–that they create worlds unto themselves.

Colombet’s compositions express this remote, aerial perspective in different yet complementary ways. While some emphasize balance and proportion with forms that seem complete and entirely self-contained, others convey complexly layered ones that seem to exist in a process of becoming, often bringing to mind intricate systems of rock that jaggedly unfold across space.

The emphasis on materiality in these paintings, from a cosmic scale to an earthly one, is rooted in Colombet’s fastidious and research-based approach to using pigments. She begins by selecting raw pigments, in this case blue green, cobalt, cobalt blue sapporo, iron oxide black, ivory black and ultramarine light titanium white, and then grinds and mixes them with a variety of solvents. She then experiments with their respective weights, type of granulation and chemical response, a process that, all told, sees her working at a near molecular level. With her linen canvas laid flat, she paints using brushes made of goat and squirrel hair that, due to their softness, allow for a control over the extent to which brushstrokes register on the surface of each work. Though her materials remain visible on the surface, what they reveal and how they do so is always enigmatic. This minimization of the hand and embrace of obfuscation reinforce the idea that her paintings are direct expressions of the earth they symbolically or metaphorically evoke.

Though Colombet brings a rigorous, almost scientific approach to the creation of her materials, what results borders on the metaphysical. The specificity of her method is set against the expansiveness of her vision. Her appreciation for what is mysterious and indeterminate in the world informs these paintings entirely, as each carefully resists stasis and defies easy categorization.

Vicky Colombet (b. 1953, Paris) lives and works between the Hudson Valley, New York City and Paris.

Colombet was raised in Paris by her French father and Filipino mother, who traveled extensively throughout Asia with her. These early travels and exposure to eastern culture and philosophy proved incredibly influential in her later artistic development.

While studying at the Sorbonne, Colombet was enveloped in a progressive Parisian Intelligentsia. Helmed by Simone de Beauvoir, Colombet co-founded the "Women's Rights League" and the newspaper, "The Feminist News". She also collaborated with iconic French actress and outspoken Feminist Delphine Seyrig on several Feminist projects including her film "Be Pretty and Shut Up" (1981).

Colombet began her career as a painter in her early twenties, studying in the atelier of French painter Henri Dimier (1899-1986), who introduced Colombet to a painstaking process of deconstructed painting involving grinding and mixing raw pigments with various solvents (oil, copal, plaster and water) from which Colombet evolved and created her own technique. Experimenting with the weights of pigments, their type of granulation, chemical response, their specific vibrations and steps for grinding, she creates her otherworldly compositions.

In the early 1980s, during a time when painting was declared “dead”, Colombet created a type of painting that did not announce itself as painting. With the aim of pausing viewers upon encountering her work, Colombet developed her singular style and methodology of painting to resemble photochemical development processes or even a form of printing, but distinctly not painting. Despite using incredibly traditional painting materials, Colombet’s obfuscation of her own hand in the work presents something iconoclastic and enigmatic.

As she developed her own style and technique of painting, Colombet also embarked on a deeper study of Buddhism (to which she had been exposed during her childhood travels) with Vietnamese monk and peace activist, Thích Nhất Hạnh. Her initial rigorous study at Plum Village, a Buddhist monastery in the south of France, and her continued Buddhist practice have tremendously affected her work.

Her flattened but incredibly dimensional works have the power to evoke Buddhist concepts of oneness–that the macro and the micro exist on the same continuum. Partnered with her existing interest in the works of painters with ethereal, mathematical and philosophical leanings such as Fra Angelico, Piero Della Francesca, Ad Reinhardt, Yves Klein, Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin, Colombet has developed a style completely her own. She believes the use of pure pigment, chemical compounds born of the cosmos, gives unique vibrations and emotional resonance to her work.

In the intervening years, Colombet has shown her work extensively internationally. She was recently the subject of the exhibition, “Unexpected Dialogue: Monet/Colombet” that paired her work with Claude Monet’s at the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, for which the museum produced an exhibition catalogue. Her work is included in the collections of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, as well as several international private collections. She has been awarded the Esther and Adolf Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2001) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2014).