Géry Lamarre

Géry Lamarre mixes colors and lacquers, applying hues then reshaping and mixing them so as to record his gestures in form and tone. The French painter explains that this blending technique was inspired by water, and there’s an unmistakably fluid, immersive quality to his more or less reflective, translucent paints. His identification with water results not only from living near France’s northern coast, but also from time spent in New Caledonia. The confluence of colorful liquids across Lamarre’s canvases varies between abstract expressionism and action painting, where shades and textures flow into one another, sometimes blending and elsewhere competing for dominance.

The elemental imagery in Lamarre’s work, the impression of watching primal forces meeting and melding in alternately explosive and smooth compositions, lends them universal immediacy. Seeing his canvases change depending on lighting and position recalls the geological upheavals of the planet’s creation, the bodily forms and movements of child birth, the pulsing energies of human passion and no less the artist’s eloquent gestures.