Christian Sorg: Surgissements

These are emergences. Fruits, flowers, the crossing of a souk, a sky, an oil on canvas according to Goya, stone landscapes or prehistoric caves: everything here appears suddenly; shapes and colors intersect and multiply, almost palpable in their roundness, their looseness, among jerks and jolts close to a leap. Although they are edged by disappearance, we cannot speak about them as abstractions, but as things seen, and thus experienced.

This selection of paintings by Christian Sorg is part of more than twenty years – a small part of the great book of hours that is his work. It shows how much seeing is perceiving, even if every achievement contains its failure, every wonder its demise. By their nuances, ever moving, their palpitations where color exclaims, these paintings are imprinted in our eyes like unbridled fluidities.

The solidity of the elements is however pronounced in certain paintings. Suddenly, the rock strikes with its appearances. We see it, in spite of its eddies and vanishing lines, erecting its landscapes. An architecture rises and unfolds its volumes, its bumps, its projections, the strange materiality of its colors. Resistances, righteousness – flaws: it emerges in our image.

There is touch in these tumuli, these stone paths, these waves of rock, coming from France or Spain. Perhaps here and there we will see animals and human beings. Some of these large paintings are indeed the silent narrators of the rocky sites visited by the painter. It is important to enter into these thousand-year-old dwellings whose interior slopes lead to the folds of memory. For his part, Christian Sorg has been committed to this for a long time. Is the painting the space from which it returns or the one in which it has remained? 

Perhaps canvases like Arcy, “Chemin des grottes I et II” seek to bring our origins back to life, through the use of an art woven into daily existence. What could be more poetic during our residency on earth than to paint the interior of one’s home? More moving than to transform the virginity of a wall into a book? More true than to link the signs born from his hand to the accidents of the rock? Perhaps the painter suggests that we find refuge in these singular spaces. 

The works of Christian Sorg offer the beauty of a world without artifice, of a timelessness that embraces everything. They whisper that if the learning of shapes and colors is the first knowledge where our senses open, it is the very concern of his art. These emergences tell of the inalienable breadth of daily life and the adventure always on the way to painting.