Sans Titre - Relief​

​

Louise Van Reeth’s practice is rooted in an exploration of the expressive and emotional power of material and color.

​

The Untitled – Relief series evokes the experience of vast open landscapes—deserts and plains where the horizon seems boundless. These immense spaces where nothing hinders the mind, where the gaze embraces a totality it instinctively recognizes; spaces that comfort us, invite us to merge with them, and remind us that everything is already here—and that we are a part of it.

“These places of silence and openness evoke for me a sense of absolute freedom, released from social norms, where the body dissolves into the environment and the mind enters an experience of unity.”

​

Each painting consists of a layer of earth sourced directly from the landscape, and a layer of intense chromatic material, closer to paint. These textured, colorful surfaces construct a space that is both physical and mental, where the memory of sensations once felt in the immensity of nature is reawakened.

​

Painting becomes a site of contemplation—a pause in the saturated flow of images and stimuli. Inspired by the Kantian notion of the “free beauty,” this series offers an aesthetic experience detached from any utilitarian function—a suspended, disinterested gaze.

​

To contemplate, here, is to step outside oneself—beyond will, beyond the impulse to possess—in order to access a deeper intuition of the world.
In this context, pictorial abstraction is not a withdrawal from reality but a path toward it: it condenses sensations, presences, memories; it opens the way to a freer perception. It calls for a mental disposition that escapes chronology, encouraging an experience of pure duration.

The Untitled – Relief series proposes an aesthetic of visual simplicity—an antidote to the complexity of the contemporary world, and a search for a sensorial purity. It reflects a kind of hypersensitivity to the world, a need to filter, translate, and distill in order to feel more acutely.

​

Color plays a central role—as an entry point into an experience of inner release. The sublime—in the sense of the vertigo one feels before the power of nature—runs through these works, inviting a transcendence of the self.
Art and nature appear here as spaces of emancipation, thresholds opening onto a new relationship with time, perception, and freedom.

​