For painter Pia Descamps, light, color and movement are the essential ingredients of her work. She manipulates those elements adroitly in her appealing landscape paintings, which are constantly pushing towards abstraction. She strips away geographic details to leave their most eloquent and geometrically pure forms. Her palette is saturated, full of deep blues, lush reds and balmy yellows. This privileging of geometry and bold tones might render a lesser painter’s compositions static, but Descamps conjures dizzying dynamism through her chosen method.
These paintings may appear to consist of smoothed swirls and hard-edged polygons, but each one of these is made up of a multitude of small, impressionistic paint daubs that are finely textured and boast an apparently infinite degree of shading and tonal variation. These details lend incredible softness and complexity to Descamps’ powerful imagery, giving her paintings’ archetypal forms porous boundaries and their bright hues subtle nuances. Her unique handling of light, color and form marries visual might and textural softness.