Trees by Nicolas Party conjures a surreal dreamscape, executed in subtle modulations of soft pastel hues. Transporting the viewer into an unknown landscape of Party’s visual universe, the present work reimagines the natural world and the landscape genre. In the present work, a screen of trees occupies the foreground, their smooth elongated forms growing from a swaying field of grass and wildflowers. Behind the trees a pink river flows, beyond which a silhouette of a dense forest graces the skyline. Stripping the forms of their textural details, Party abstracts the natural world into geometric shapes; the trees become abstracted into elongated tendrils, whilst the river becomes a single solid mass of colour. Engaging in a dialogue with the traditions of representation, abstraction and imagination, Party constructs a playful yet complex visual language.

Party begins his compositions with impulses from memory, weaving echoes from his own imagination with historical painterly traditions. His early career experience working as a 3D animator in an animation studio merges with the surreal landscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe and Rene Magritte, culminating in a graphic yet painterly style that follows in an art historical lineage but remains resolutely in the contemporary lexicon. Likewise, in his choice of subject matter, Party looks to canonical genres of landscapes, portraits and still lives. “I’m trying to work with subjects that are not original. Subjects that have been, and still are, painted all the t.mes ,” says Party, “What fascinates me about these topics is their capacity to regenerate themselves at any period of history, and still be relevant to us. I also believe some subjects are always painted because they are an infinite source of meaning and inspiration” (Nicolas Party quoted in: Federica Tattoli, “Talking with the Swiss Painter Nicolas Party,” Fruit of the Forest, 2016 (online)).

Party’s medium of choice is pastel, and the present work exemplifies the unique qualities afforded by the softness of the pastel pigment and the precision with which he employs the medium. Party first became interested in pastels when he saw Pablo Picasso’s Tête de femme from 1921,and was taken by the way in which Picasso translated the smooth, voluptuous mass of Roman and Greek marble statuary into a masterful rendering of form with pastels on paper. In the present work, the pastels allow for a smooth geometric rendering of the trees, whilst also allowing precise execution of details on the field of grass. The mattified texture creates a vivid, saturated surface that express three-dimensionality with soft subtlety, a unique formal quality of Party’s works. Applying the soft chalk material with his fingertips, Party is drawn to the immediacy and vibrancy of the powedery nature of pastel pigment. Speaking about the process of working with pastels, Party describes, “you can layer and layer, but you can’t start over. The nature of the medium is much more direct. Nothing dries or is wet – it stays exactly how it is.” (Nicolas Party quoted in: Ted Loos, “Artist Nicolas Party Revives the Language of Pastel,”Cultured Mag, March 2019 (online))

Simple, seductive and highly accessible, Party’s works engage in dialogue with the art-historical binaries of representation and abstraction, observation and imagination. Party’s works have been displayed within esteemed institutions including the Musée Magritte, Brussels; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Dallas Museum of Art, dallas; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Swiss Institute, New York and a major career retrospective at the Montreal Museum of Replica Handbags s.