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11 AUGUST > 03 SEPTEMBER 2010

"A RICE PAPER STORY",

paintings and drawings by MARC RAMBEAU

Marc Rambeau is a nomadic artist, ever on the move, both literally and artistically. He travels the world “ Europe, Asia, the Pacific “ and comes back with artistic records of his discoveries: urban landmarks, people and scenes that have stirred his visual sensitivity. But this French born artist always returns to Australia, where he has been living since 1985, more specifically to Canberra, which has been his home base for the past eight years. Here his inspiration is nourished mostly by the vast empty landscapes of the bush – pure geology and botany, devoid of any human presence. One can think of various reasons for this: Rambeau's deep connection to the countryside which he likes exploring days on end, thus finding peace; but the gracefulness of his Tahitian dancers is also peaceful.

Because the countryside is a dominant feature of Australia; but then again, Rambeau also delights in painting playful beach scenes at Bondi or Manly. Or because the Australian bush, through its very vastness and emptiness, is radically different from any European landscape and therefore strikes the immigrant's eyes with its exoticism: see John Glover or Eugene von Guérard, freshly arrived from their native countries,

discovering the towering masses of the forests and mountains of Van Diemen's Land or the Dandenong Ranges and gradually turning into true Australian painters, drawing away from the tradition of Claude Lorrain and Caspar David Friedrich they had been following. But Sidney Nolan and Fred Williams, to take just two, were no immigrants and the bush also fascinated them.

Rambeau is at his best shaping the slopes of a hill with a swift, unswerving, stroke of his brush.

He is also a master colorist: the reds, yellows and ochres on his palette possess the earthiness of the desiccated hills of Tidbinbilla; his blues, the depth of the unpolluted sky over the Australian Alps. Even his use of rice paper on linen “ a technique he has adapted with great success after his Chinese experience and which is practically unique in Western painting “ with its fault like creases striating the canvas, contributes to evoke the parched texture of the native soil. And

though his strokes are bold and his colors often straight out of the tube, don't think him rash!


Jean Poncet