Painting

It is though everything sprang from there, achieving completion at last in the flamboyance of Provence, but only after any number of side roads had been exhausted. This desire to paint is an absolute need. As though Paris, the years of training, the learning of various techniques — engraving, the obsession of line — all this was no more than a useful detour leading to the ultimate unfolding of the artist’s deeper self — a painter reaching for the absolute.

Revisiting the same motif over and over again, cutting back and purifying, led Alfred Latour to an ever more stripped out painting style, that verges on abstraction. Thus, the mastery of line, the clarity of colours conjugated with a sobriety of composition which reduces objects to their simplest expression, all these evoke a feeling of careless lightness. And yet, everything in this equilibrium is most carefully considered.

Every painting bears witness to its times and, one by one, each reflects the various currents of the day, without us ever knowing which influence is prompting what effect.

Nicolas Raboud