Nicolas Poignon
Mist and Sun

Nicolas Poignon (b. 1963 Nancy) works in two registers that might, at first glance, seem to belong to different painters altogether. In silverpoint, that most exacting and irreversible of drawing methods, he renders landscapes stripped to their essential structure - fields, tree lines, the soft collapse of horizon into sky. Each almost feels like a misty, ephemeral recollection of a place held in memory rather than space. The medium itself resists correction; each mark is final, and it is perhaps this permanence that allows the drawings their particularly impermanent quality. As you look, they unfold slowly rather than all at once like a memory evoked in the tiny, precious moments of recollection, not in one crystal-clear snapshot. There is something of the mist in this in the slow, soft-edged, gradual way of seeing that the silverpoint's grey tonality seems almost to demand.

Turn from these quiet studies to his oil sketches and the temperature of the exhibition changes entirely. Here the cities Poignon paints are asserted in saturated colour and confident impasto - rooftops, façades, the incident of urban space, rendered with a heat and directness that silverpoint, by its nature, could never allow. Poignon delves into urban landscapes that feel at once familiar and yet deserted - they are almost exclusively devoid of human subjects. Instead, Poignon allows the buildings that bustle with the chaotic energy of the humans living within them to evoke human presence, like an anthropic mirage: from afar, humans could dwell in his works, but in close-up, they are really rather lonely scenes. If the silverpoints landscapes have the patience of mist, the cityscapes have the clarity of sun. Both, however different in medium, are similar in the solitude they evoke.

Poignon seems to move between sun and mist in this exhibition, bringing the two together not as opposites but as complementary weathers of the same eye - an artist equally at ease in the slow unfolding of a silverpoint line and the bright declaration of oil on canvas.