pix pix accueil
courtade pixpoint lanoe pixpoint mazilu pixpoint horst pixpoint duc pixpoint poumeyrol pixpoint duc pixpoint arnaud pixpoint plaindoux
Lanoë, just like a monk who accepts the Golden Rule which will lead him to Salvation, has chosen to explore, throughout his life, the infinite possibilities that a mere rectangle of naked canvas between four lines provided to him. It is this austere enclosure that he elected as his domain of perfection. In that stylized battle field, in that existence summary, he lays out his own destiny with each strategic stroke of his brush or pen. 
Any new work is for him a metaphysical game of Go. 
Each line, each graphic, each shape, is an aspiration towards the entities that command, somewhere in the Universe, total harmony. Each action on the canvas or sheet of paper is meant to occupy the very place which must satisfy both the eye and the intellect. 
These rules printed in our brain, which the artist obeys, are the reflections of those dictated to scientists by science. They move him to discover the laws that will place the spirit in harmony with the laws of creation. 
He will devote his life to making them intelligible for himself and those who view his work.

Lanoë is inhabited by the will not configure anything that might escape rigorous reason, the ideal plan that commands elaboration in his work. Chance has not place in in a world dominated by rigor. Any escape toward the chaos would seem to jeopardize the universal equilibrium. 
The slightest deviation from the most minor curve would represent a risk of jeopardy, in the same manner as the tiniest petite flaw in the celestial mechanism could cause planets to collide. Lanoë, at his level and in his field, is the disciple of the great decipherer of the principles of the universe such as Newton, Galileo or Copernicus.
He has chosen the narrow path that leads to the discovery of truth. 
The Renaissance artists already sought the mysteries of Beauty and Truth in all the productions of human mind. Art and science were closely intermingled at that time because those disciplines were seeking to discover together the principles that govern the world. Lanoë, for his part, is seeking the more subtle, more concealed commands of laws that he can feel inside himself and wants to pass over into his canvases. 


There is in the human brain an innate tendency to compare, grade and seek dogmas. These implicit rules are present in any artistic production, but the abstract painter wants, by eliminating what he considers as unnecessary and anecdotal, to make them even more intelligible. Of the shape of things, of life itself, he wants to give only their working drawings. He does not want to deny representations but transcend them by revealing their essence. 

Yet, this strict asceticism has not led Lanoëto dryness or paucity. Many painters, by taking on this way, have limited themselves more and more, thus causing inspiration depletion. For his part, he managed to make it fruitful. If he has intentionally refined his work by the control he has exercised over it at any time, he has managed to develop it over time. In successive steps, he has explored every possibility offered by the graphic fields he would discover in and around himself. Year after year, he has thus shed particularities, the lines of force of multiple areas, be it geometrical, musical, topographical, mineralogical or even biological…
He wanted to bring out the essential rules or to create new ones that would be in line with his spirit of discipline and precision. There is the depth of this undertaking that we may judge as arid at first sight. There is no work more intentionally limiting to the essentials: never any representations of beings, of things, allusions to the surrounding nature, inhabitable places, objects or characters. No still-life, no landscape, no portraits! This painter is in quest for the essence of Beauty before his incarnation into sentiment. He only represents what is at the boundary of the concrete: the geological accidents of our planet, the atmospheric phenomena surrounding it, the glows, the flashes of lightning, the halos, and the evocations of rainbows or the aurora borealis. He calls on the mineral world, limestone, granite or basalt strata, breaks and fractures in the rocks where we see concretions, fossil fragments. Also a cartographer, topographer’s job: town patterns, a junction of imaginary road networks. Maps of cities still to be built or that time has reduced to the state of a blueprint. A virtual universe in which, before creation, the creator has sought the law for its layout. He also explores the world of the infinitely small: microbes wandering in organic liquids the microscopic vision of which simplifies the outlines. The encounter of colored entities the edges of which repel each other on the epidermis of the paper. Magnetic movements, a shift from a shape to other shapes … the latter combine, collide gently, superpose each other like delicate paramecia. Abstract representations sometimes seem to rejoin our world of representations: large ragged and parallel pyramids evoke balsamic rocks or cypresses bent by the wind; we think we recognize ice floes drifting on polar seas, wisps of clouds on the horizon, strips of land in the water of a lake, of a delta, or aerial views of cultivated fields. Maybe it is out of laziness that we align these coordinates, only because we are prisoners or our familiar visions. In his works, the abnegation of our usual benchmarks provides us the opportunity to part with the terrestrial obstacles to enter into this world where only the spirit is at stake.





Lanoë‘s creations only penetrate a small thickness of the canvas or paper. The depth does not exceed the superposition of several layers of colors and the transparency he uses so often allows the viewer to follow the shape of it… The true depth is that of the white.

A white that provides the same infinite perspective as that of the dazzle of a sky bathed in light. The depth of the black too, which, instead of stopping the eye, invites it to go on beyond its opacity.
In these representations there are hardly any volumes.
It is most often a play of lines and surfaces. The curves distort themselves to follow the paths which seem to highlight the mathematical precepts but yet they always imperceptibly turn away from them to obey other constraints which are those of aesthetics.
The latter demand a space for freedom and invention to escape the evident line of the curves known by surveyors.
When a diagram has blossomed, in order to keep it from being diverted from its perfection by adding another surface or curve, the painter lets it show by transparence. He will not let anything escape his strategy. By the subtle play of these superpositions he leads us to discover the steps he followed until he achieved the final balance.
Lanoë’s work sometimes evokes Scarlatti’s series of sonatas or Bach's Art of Fugue and their countless variations.

Whenever he decides to explore a graphic theme, he seeks to exhaust all possible developments. In some series, he will thus explore, based on the initial idea, all harmonic declinations. The transparency will then allow the viewer to distinguish every single part in the same manner as a listener will make out each melodic line in the whole mass of sounds. Each representation of figures is followed by the eye in the same manner as the superpositions of musical themes are followed by the listener of a piece of chamber music or a symphony.

This work within a closed field and with a deliberately limited number of elements is not a static one.
It is a work in motion: one cannot only follow the progress of the successive layers added one after the other with patience, but also these spaces and the shapes the canvas is filled with are full of tensions: immobile explosions, revolutions of celestial objects, galactic outburst. Solid blocks seem to have come to their maximum antagonist thrust in spite of their apparent immobility. One can see colored masses that appear to be attracted or repelled by electric poles, magnetisms that draw daring lines of force and curves running across the canvas to suggest, beyond it, a large dynamic field.
The painter has sometimes sought a more concrete materializing of the intangible surfaces laid down on his canvas. He has chosen the transparent, crumpled, creased paper, retaining in its folds some strips of colors. You can guess that repressed exquisite delight takes refuge in the silky softness of that paper and in the sumptuousness of the colors to the benefit of more denuded figurations. If there is no immediately tangible sensuality in this work, the viewer clearly feels the delectation experienced by the painter in delicately placing a color next to another, making a warm and luminous shade pop amidst cold surfaces, in giving the clumped and creased paper the shimmering effects of light on elytra and in making his surfaces giving to the eye by the diversity of their graphics and the variety of their aspects.



Lanoë loves deep, srong colors which evoke gems or the mystic lights of stained glass windows: blues, greens, violets, bordeaux reds, ochres, blood reds with organ tones.
These colors are applied as thin, transparent dabs or as thicker layers where the brushstrokes can be seen. But most often he makes them vibrate by means of subtle color gradients, dots, spots and also by variations in the color itself which are tinged with either close or complementary shades.
He contrasts these patches of intense light with other parts where the viewer can see pale shades with close tones: pink beiges, silvery purples, water greens, very light gray.
They contrast with the areas of vivid colors like the soft notes of a very lighlty touched keyboard next to a series of bright tones. His favorite colors are actually black and white.
This white that forms the backbone of each work and will show, luminous as it is, until completion, through the successive layers. White on white, whites nearly white, creamy whites, greyish-whites, whites with a mottling of grey.
Smooth, opaque white where invasive vegetation grows, out of a corner. The dazzling white of the solar orb.
The white moon circle bathes the canvas in an opal-like light.
A pure white crossing a dark surface in a blinding flash, or a smooth white, edible, which lays down on the composition a large soothing surface.

White calls to black, this priviledged tone, present in each one of his works and, since his days as a trained engraver, has retained both its intense force and its softness.
He uses it in all its shades: from absolute black to nearly black, from deep blue-black to greyish or reddish black.
The wide range of these dark surfaces responds to those of the whites, counterbalancing them.
From illumination in the light to the infinite in the transparent darkness. From white where the spirit merges with the Whole, to the fruitful black of the depths of the night. 

Lanoë's patient and evolutionary work is not a seductive work at first sight. It does not allow us into the universe of sensuality and passions. It demands the viewer to follow a spiritual path which, like that of the mystic, should lead to a wider and more cosmic comprehension. One will not achieve that by way of words, sentences or meanings but via the shapes and their layout.

Meditation in front of each of these immobile worlds shall lead us to a deeper intelligence of the laws of creation and to immerse ourselves into them with serenity. But it would be misleading to believe that he acquired the harmony he offers to those who contemplate his works without any struggle. By refusing any representation, retaining from the real only the least tangible, Lanoë has deliberately sacrificed what could gain him public acceptance. He eradicated from his work the least bit of complacency, the least bit of abandon to what he considered as superfluous. He had the courage to refrain from his own impulses in the same manner as an ascetic overcomes material things. On his path towards pure, absolute beauty, he could not tolerate burdening himself with profane representations. He has exerted over all his paintings relentless censorship. This very refusal gives his work this underlying strength. It is the bubbling itself, above which the discipline of the spirit hangs, which confers the strong tension. At what price of hard demands was this stage reached? He alone can be aware of it. At the same time, wasn’t this the only path the painter could follow, by imposing limits on himself and not letting his spirit get lost in the chaos?

top
Pierre Lanoë
rue des Grenadiers, 11 800 Marseillette (Aude) - FRANCE
+33 (0)4 68 78 29 23

Contact: plaindoux.peintre@free.fr design: Audrey Lefeuvre