How does Nicolas Pincemin manage to get us lost in his life-size painted forests? Is it because they are so realistic? Because they are like sets in a theatre? Do they turn us into actors in a woodland scene? In any case the magic works. The trees are right there, as are the path and the puddles reflecting the sky – you can almost smell it all! Not only do we walk right into these living cathedrals, we feel as if the nature of the trees were becoming part of us. A closer look shows that the painter is using artifice to draw us into his vision of things. The power of these paintings is based on clever optical illusions but also, and above all, owes much to conceptual stratagems. These are not just pictures. The painted subject leads our gaze astray until it is no longer us seeing the forest but the forest seeing us. Nicolas Pincemin grew up in the Jura hills. A bright lad, he was educated in Besançon, Strasbourg, Aix and Marseille. His original approach and stubborn attachment to representative painting owe as much to the Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception as to the examples of Gerhard Richter, Peter Doig or Jasper Johns. A painter to his fingertips!
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By Gérard Martin
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