The Dyonisian Pleasures of Landscapes

 Albert Kresh or the dyonisian pleasures of landscapes

The Lohin Geduld gallery exhibits up until the 13th February 2010, landscapes paintings by Albert Kresch. Albert Kresh's paintings linger in our memories because his colors are shaped as a vibrant clay. More over, Kresch's thick color patterns and technique, using mixed media, give his pieces of work this deepness that reminds us of Paul Cezanne, Fauvism, the Nabis group's painting. These groups and artists all claimed the superiority of colors on shape. It is why we see melted shapes in Kresh's art, as if the sun and its light were the central subjects of his paintings.

Albert Kresh's art is dyonisian. Dyonisos was in fact the ancient Greek god of dance, wine and pleasure: Dyonisos was the symbol of wild instinct, of animality in man and mysterious sexual desire that assaults us. The strengh of  his color lines and sets' pagan beauty appeal us, and then become a tight embrace.

In a short story, A passion in the desert, the French writer Balzac by describing the strange relationship between a lost soldier in an oasis and a panther, dealt with the idea of our own animality coiled in us that reveal itself in extreme circumstances. The painter wants to go above all limities throught his colors: Albert Kresh shapes the light of theses Mediterranean countries or lands and bring back to life, smells, sensations and pleasures. We also remember Colette and her lively novels that gave life to a sensual relation between mankind and nature.

We then can think of Giono's novels that celebrated Provence's sensuous world, as in Giono's Horseman on the roof, where landscapes come alive, and nature becomes an independant character of the story. Lavender, thym, cypresses surrounds houses and play with the moving shades of Kresh sapphire's skies in which as a subtle embroiderer he sews water lily colored clouds. We find this same genuiness in Van Gogh's art who made of South of France his second homeland, and who sculpted as Michelangelo marble, his powerful colors.

The novelist and playwriter Marcel Pagnol talked about Provence as being the country of thirst, and Albert Kresh by his dancing vivid and lustuous colors suggests heat, by suggesting the presence of the sun aiming its fired arrows to the tree tops, hills, meadows. Goldy hay, bursting greens, strong white shades in a chromatic explosion are many clues to feel this dyonisian power of colors.

Above all, Kresh illustrates some ideas of Nietzsche's philosophy: Dyonisos is the embodiement of this wild strengh our civilization has to find back, and the truth that we have to discover in order to undo the mold of Christianity and industralization that has killed our real animal nature.