CHRISTIAN SORG: Los Prados

The Emergence of a World

Since his earliest works, operating within the grand symphonic realm of pictorial abstraction, Christian Sorg has found his harmonies and affinities outside the confines of theoretical or discursive frameworks that might narrow his field of exploration. It is through a complete freedom of action—where his nervous, decisive gestures, at times gentle and tempered but always assured, drive the lines of force, create spaces, and inscribe markings—that the artist carves out a unique, personal, vibrant, and emotive path. This intimate harmony is woven with the vital environments he inhabits.

By recently choosing to develop a series of paintings titled Los prados (The Meadows), Sorg underscores his profound connection to nature, to the earth, and to the incomparable diversity of the world around him. He strives to capture its most minute, even invisible, fragments and transpose them into painting with no guiding framework other than the decisive and imperative moment of unbounded creation. It has often been said—and the artist himself affirms it—that Christian Sorg’s quest is fundamentally about painting, that the true subject is painting itself. It is a daunting challenge, where victory is never final, as each canvas, drawing, or project becomes a new conquest.

Yet, it is important not to confuse this with the principle of “art for art’s sake” as it has sometimes been championed. Here, within the depths of abstraction, Sorg undoubtedly integrates many realities that he works with, composes, and above all lives: the presence of nature, the influence of nearby surroundings, the specific circumstances of the moment, and the importance of the human experience—its feelings, impressions, attentions, emotions, and thoughts. His painting emerges, in this circumstantial and momentary concentration, as the result of a complex chemical precipitate with inherently unpredictable reactions. It is here that the entire magic of his painting unfolds.

In these times of climate upheavals that dangerously disrupt the planetary balances essential to our survival, celebrating—through pictorial brilliance—the awareness of our connections to nature, to meadows, trees, grasses, flowers, and to the vital energies we depend on, can only lead to an urgent, necessary, and indispensable respect in the pursuit of balance, from which humanity has everything to gain. Such a commitment also celebrates the richness of the natural world and its positive impact on humans—those who take the time to listen to it and receive its benefits, here translated into sources of revealing wonder. This is where the magic of a world with hopeful omens unfolds, and where a manifest wisdom comes to life.

For Christian Sorg, the creative process follows no fixed rules, except for his willingness to be guided by a multitude of perceptions, allowing himself to be overwhelmed by the varied stimuli of the sensory world, which he transmutes into strokes of intense, vibrant color. This is how he brings forth a new and unprecedented world, yet one in close and constant connection with our everyday reality. His marks, his bursts of color, his oil stick gestures, and his brushwork, created in the urgency of their existence, are vital traces saturated with an imperious energy, driven by the spontaneity of intuitive decisions charged with sensory memory.

Asserted, then partially erased, covered over, modified with the same fervor, or left in their raw, imperative state, these marks impose not just a color, a luminous density, or a volume, but take full possession of the space, regenerating it far from the laws of gravity, as though in improbable levitation. They create a unique, purely pictorial realm—a dynamic disorder that is curiously harmonious, despite eluding any predictable or hidden order.

The Los prados series—the meadows and their horizons—are wild and untamable, constantly shifting under warm or cool winds, violent or soft, burned by the sun, greened by the rain, crushed by storms, gusts, animal gallops, or human footsteps, and tinted by the reflections of the sky or the shadows of clouds. Never identical to themselves, they are perpetually reinvented by the painter’s agile and inventive hand.

When confronted with these paintings, their creative modality, and the artist's open attitude to listening to the world and transmitting it, their essential and vital nature suddenly becomes evident: it is, above all else, an eminently and profoundly poetic approach. It is through this poetic essence that a world emerges—a world that amazes, moves, touches, convinces, and offers moments of connection we wish to preserve and carry within ourselves.

How can one not recall Rimbaud, who assigned colors to vowels to enchant words and imbue them with unprecedented brilliance, just as Christian Sorg lends to the winds, to the breath of life, to the rustling of leaves, to shadows and light, all the shades of an infinitely multiplied rainbow, captivating our senses—all of them, constantly summoned. How can one not evoke Baudelaire's Correspondences when the poet of Les Fleurs du mal writes:

"Nature is a temple where living pillars / Sometimes let out confused words; (…) Perfumes, colors, and sounds respond to one another (…) Singing the ecstasies of the mind and the senses."

And how can one not call upon René Char, who, in his collection La parole en archipel, titled a poem La Paroi et la Prairie (The Wall and the Meadow) in reference to the prehistoric caves of Lascaux—art that is so clearly a source of inspiration for Christian Sorg. His deep reverence for these parietal masterpieces as the origins of art resonates through his work.

All of Sorg’s pictorial oeuvre—whether born of his studios in Paris, Burgundy near Vézelay, or Spain in Calaceite—rests on his rare ability to fully poeticize painting, and in doing so, the world he claims as his own. Few contemporary modern painters manage to elevate their language to such a superior poetic level. Aside from the likes of Cézanne and Monet, one might sense a familial kinship with Cy Twombly, Olivier Debré, Pierre Tal-Coat, and Joan Mitchell among the select few.

This poetic perspective, which elevates the sensory, leads the painter to a Baudelairean form of eroticization of the tender grass (Los prados), insofar as something troubling and voluptuously unfamiliar emanates from this painting, and something mysteriously sensual slips into the dance of the pictorial body. It is also in the way a true chromatic pleasure is expressed—both tumultuous and caressing—awakening the senses through the nervousness or softness of the strokes, marks, and traces. This is where the unpredictable unfolds in a kind of fullness.

Claude Lorent (b. 1943) lives and works in Tubize, Belgium, and has been making extended stays in Andalusia for over twenty years. He is a cultural journalist, art critic (AICA), and exhibition curator.