Nicolas de CRÉCY Montagnes. Dessins - peintures - recherches
Presentation
From 25 April to 31 May 2025, the Huberty & Breyne gallery in Brussels is hosting an exhibition of the work of Nicolas de Crécy (France, 1966) entitled “Montagnes — Dessins - peintures – recherches”. De Crécy’s aim with this exhibition is to take viewers on a journey in which he mirrors the sensations of walking in the high mountains.
In some seventy works employing a variety of techniques – painting, collage, engraving, charcoal drawing and watercolour – he draws on personal experience to recreate the atmosphere particular to a mountain landscape.
- If there’s one thing that both moves and fascinates me it’s mountains. I’ve been walking in the mountains for years now. Apart from being passionate about these landscapes, I’m concerned (like many of my contemporaries) about the rapid changes we’re witnessing in mountains everywhere thanks to global warming. It’s a terrain that will soon have altered beyond all recognition, so I feel I have to “document” it. We know that the paths we walk today will be perilous tomorrow, that rocks are giving way, no longer retained by ice, and that the ski industry is disfiguring the valleys, and so on and so forth.
In order to really penetrate the mysteries of the high mountains and capture their particular atmosphere, their unique light, I decided on a broad-based approach: sketches in situ, paintings in the studio, collages, engravings, charcoal drawings and watercolours. A sort of research lab, if you like, an “attempt at exhausting a place” in the words of George Perec. With the idea that the exhibition would provide a pictorial journey, rather like a walk in the mountains.
The project, which has taken two years to complete, encompasses some seventy artworks in varying formats, from sweeping panoramas to delicate little watercolours. My aim with this body of work is to recreate the powerful and magical impressions, be they fleeting or eternal, that we experience when we climb those steep paths up towards the peaks. Until not so long ago, before they became a valuable source of revenue, mountains were a place to be venerated and feared: venturing into the mountains required ritual and ceremony – a ritual that I have recreated in my own fashion, through different forms of representation that enable me to grasp the sacred quality that mountains convey to those who take the time to really contemplate them.”
Nicolas de Crécy
PRIVATE VIEW
Thursday 24 April 2025
in the presence of the artist
EXHIBITION
From Friday 25 April 2025
to Saturday 31 May 2025
Bruxelles | Châtelain
33, place du Châtelain
Wednesday > Saturday 11.00 am - 6.00 pm