Gerald Petit has long practiced painting and photography in parallel, in a confrontation
of painting towards the infinite technological possibilities offered by digital photography
and retouching software to demonstrate the possibility of painting, still, not “in spite
of” digital photography but “with” or “beyond” it. His deep skies vibrating under the
faint light of a moon obscured by clouds, portraits of his mother, or hands depicted
in strange rituals draw on the intersecting histories of the two mediums. The blacks
in his paintings are never obtained by using black paint, but by adding the colors of
the palette. The blacks reveal themselves, revealing the subject of the paintings in
the same way as the photographic image is revealed in chemical baths, or as any
digital image is revealed by the addition of red, green and blue pixels. In his skies, the
superimposed colors develop the black of the paint.
These twilight skies don’t exist anywhere, their blackness is impossible because
they are endowed with the vibrating reddish, bluish, greenish dimension that gives
them their singular depth, and whose artifice is revealed on the edges of the frames,
revealing the leftovers and overhangs of the colors used.
Each sky is an unreal, mental projection, created by a series of alchemical gestures
that transmute color into sooty obscurity, trans- forming the liquid matter of paint
into a gaseous evanescence penetrated only by the pale light of an invisible moon.
The series of paintings featuring hands, three of which are in the FRAC Auvergne
collection, have their origins in studies of hands as painted by Nicolas de Largillière
in the 18th century or Ingres in the 19th century. In a phantasmatic apparition, a hand
emerges from the darkness of the painting. ...
