Almine Rech is currently presenting Moon Rising in Daylight, the first solo exhibition by Christopher Le Brun at the gallery. On view from October 18 through December 20, 2025, the exhibition brings together a new body of large-scale paintings that reflect Le Brun’s long-standing engagement with the poetics of material, gesture, and image, articulated through a deepened commitment to the physicality of painting itself.
Le Brun’s approach is grounded in a practice of layering—of placing, depositing, and building paint over time. These works emerge not from a single impulse but through sustained acts of repetition and revision. They accumulate slowly, recording the tempo of the body, the rhythm of the brush, and the painter’s evolving response to the canvas. The surfaces are settled into painterly terrains that refuse transparency, resisting any reading that would seek to move through the painting in search of illusionistic depth. Instead, the viewer is drawn to move across the surface—left to right, top to bottom—registering the interplay of gesture, color, and scale. This horizontality is further emphasized by Le Brun’s use of vertical panels, often joined side by side. These modular structures open up expansive visual fields while retaining the internal logic of each panel’s own painterly event.
The horizon, in Le Brun’s work, is not a vanishing point but an operative threshold—what he refers to as the “hinterland” of the painting. It is the space from which the work arises and to which it remains connected: a matrix of influence that includes memory, myth, landscape, culture, and metaphysical inquiry. Think of the exhibition title, Moon Rising in Daylight, describing a natural phenomenon that is both common and strange, an event that hovers between states of being and seeing. In these elusive works, color becomes a structuring force. Pigments shift across the surface with luminous subtlety or assertive contrast, registering not only chromatic decisions but emotional resonance. The brushwork ranges from sweeping arcs to tightly modulated strokes, inscribing a memory of movement and time into the painting’s skin. Some passages appear veiled or recessed; others pulse with density and clarity. This dynamic surface activity invites the eye to linger and roam, never fully settling, always returning.
For more information, please consult Almine Rech’s website here.
Last Updated on October 27, 2025
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About the author:
Maxim Foucquet is a curator, art critic, and contemporary artist residing and working in Belgium.
