Gravity

Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by French painter Gilles Teboul entitled Gravity on view from October 17 to November 17, 2018. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. The public is invited to the artist reception on Saturday, November 3, from 5pm to 7pm.

The work of Gilles Teboul is a perfect hybridization of elements as diverse as the minimalist aesthetic of artists such as John McCracken and Dan Flavin, and the delicate shading and fluorescent colors of the OS X. His ordered, shiny, lacquered paintings are composed of pigments bonded together by an acrylic resin which is absorbed into the canvas for many hours. Balanced on a flat plane, Teboul pours on paint which spreads over the surface without his intervention.

The paintings reach their definitive form upon conception, alleviating gesture and allowing the undercoat to rise to the surface. Any hint of the artist’s hand is removed, while the luminosity created seems to be conjured from light itself. Color, in its purest form, distributes itself onto the canvas. His choice of materials creates a visual vocabulary distinctly his own–pale pink is rendered with an undercurrent of deep purple, while midnight blue emerges into spring green.

Depending on the angle of light, the paintings shift dramatically within a spectrum of colors and hues. What appears as monochromatic is belied by the richness of tone that literally seems to vibrate under the surface. The picture plane appears to glow with its own illumination, making a close examination crucial to the viewer’s understanding and experience of the work. Light itself becomes the subject, which places Teboul’s artistic preoccupations clearly within the framework of many important 20th and 21st century artists such as Mark Rothko, Larry Bell and David Simpson.

Gilles Teboul was born in 1961 in Paris, where he currently lives and works. Teboul has had recent exhibitions at 5UN7 in Bordeaux, Volta 13 in Basel, Galerie Bruno Massa in Los Angeles, and Art Busan in South Korea. He has exhibited in various international venues since 1995, and his work is included in numerous private and public collections. Gravity is his first solo exhibition with Nancy Toomey Fine Art.