North Face

Philippe Courtois has worked twenty years with decorative painting in the most beautiful private residences around the World. Constrained by style concerns, budget or fashion, he came to feel, more than ever, the need to express an overflow of creativity in liberated, unleashed work.

Using the materials from decoration's work sites, wether very simple or luxurious, He realizes compositions, three dimensional collages, balancing sculpting and painting, as explosions on canvas. It is thus that he combines embossed leathers, parchments, tattered cardboard, and floor protection, stained by gesso or paint. Charged with the city's energy, He attempts to render that vitality, delivering a testimony of its contrasts and contradictions.

The work discloses the striking poverty that in New York, as nowhere else, lives side by side with promiscuous wealth. Staged in this way, painted cardboard and torn, in scripted packagings dispute the most elegant finishes.

In the end, the composition as a whole prevails, preventing us from unraveling one element from the other.

Colorful plates of plexiglass animate the pieces, insinuating light, accentuating the volumes and planes.

The light gliding on the angles, ricochets off the reflective parts, loosing itself into the cracks and dissipating on the flats. The transparent or translucid screens are the mask, which, as in decoration, come to modify and embellish a crude or violent reality.