Exhibition: The Shift
Galerie Caldwell Snyder – St Helena, Californie
May 28 – June 21
From the remnants of day to the first breath of night, that uncertain passage has always been both a pictorial and poetic theme. A mix of sensations and emotions: the quiet regret of light dying out, and the calm rising with the soft violet shadows sliding over the facades. Where everything was once distinct and readable, boundaries turn blurry, almost indifferent. Day shows; night suggests.
And yet the sky is still bright. The sun, having slipped behind the horizon, continues to light up the clouds. Night, meanwhile, has already taken the city. Shadows have stretched and spread, swallowing the last streaks of light.
In just a moment, the shift has happened.
Entangled all day long, shadows and light suddenly part ways, each returning to its own territory: the sky for one, the ground for the other. We say that night “falls,” but really it rises—like a slow flood rising from the earth, submerging the city. This “terrestrial dusk” gradually comes alive with a multitude of artificial lights: streetlamps, signs, headlights, shop windows, cafés, restaurants, and the lamps inside apartments glowing as evening approaches. Tiny bright dots in the dark—little stars in this inverted night. These fleeting, intense moments are the ones I wanted to capture again.
I’ve sketched San Francisco and its surroundings endlessly in my notebooks. That time spent drawing on-site is a time of immersion, when you gradually grasp the face of a city—its structure, its shape, its expression—creating as much a portrait as an urban landscape.
One of the great strengths of drawing is the slow time it demands to translate reality. A sketch begun in late afternoon often ends when night has already settled. With the level of attention drawing requires, you witness night emerging in every detail—or more accurately, in the way it swallows the details.
A drawing isn’t just a document of the space you depict; it’s also a memory vessel for the slow shifts of light over that space. The passing hours imprint themselves in your mind as much as perspective, proportions, or the hierarchy of details.
Drawing allows you to know a place, to store its memories.
(“What I have not drawn, I have not seen.” — Goethe)
These memories will be reinterpreted once I move to painting. Reinterpreted through the technique itself, which brings color and texture onto the framework laid by the drawing, but also through the format, the reframing, and again through the long time required for painting.
Often, during those days spent painting an urban scene or a landscape, there are crossroads where the canvas can tilt toward one resolution or another. It might be a hesitation between slightly different viewpoints or another light of the day. The three “Albion’s Corner” paintings and the “Nob Hill” series—day and night—come from this desire to offer a nocturnal counterpart to a sunlit street, or a subtle shift in perspective and framing. As if the viewer had moved just a little, trying to better contemplate the passage from day to night.
Gilles Marrey