Galerie Elsa Meunier and Galerie Mathilde Le Coz are delighted to present Seven Birds in a Tree, Looking in Every Direction, the first solo exhibition by German painter Jörg Kratz in France. This is the painter's second collaboration with the galleries. For this occasion, the artist is presenting thirteen canvases, which will be hung in seven different locations each day of the exhibition.

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The light struggles to penetrate the dark foliage, plunging the undergrowth into a damp, icy darkness. Muffled, furtive noises rustle under the dead leaves, like muffled whispers. The air is heavy, almost palpable, laden with the smell of frost and humus. Every breath of wind seems to carry the echo of ancient secrets, and the edge, so close, yet seems inaccessible, like an impassable frontier. In the forest painted by Jörg Kratz, silence is a burden, lightened only by the occasional birdsong.

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Like the unstable layout of the exhibition, each image is volatile and elusive. Our gaze wanders from branch to branch. Visitors are lost in this Friedrian forest. Like the protagonists in Tarkovsky's film Stalker, they need guidance in this wasteland. Here, the painter becomes the director of this disorientation, but also the guide for those who have lost their way. To find your way back, all you have to do is follow his brush. Under the light dance of bluish tones, the forest fades away like a dream dissolving in the mist. The trees, barely outlined, melt into a calm sea of cobalt, their trunks touched by pale, almost spectral light, appearing like shadows lost in a watery world. Slivers of azure sparkle here and there, like fragments of a forgotten sky.

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Jörg Kratz's works are characterised by such intense abstraction that references to the landscape only emerge in the suggestion of the verticality of a trunk or a horizon line. In his oils, the unevenly-spread colour reveals the rough support of the canvas glued to wood, and the planes are blurred to play with the depths that are revealed in transparency according to the light. These shades and vaporous brushstrokes are reminiscent of the paintings of Eugène Carrière and James Abbott Whistler. In his watercolours, the washes liquefy the shapes of the forests and marshes, revealing only an uncertain memory.

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In contrast to the frenetic pace of contemporary life, Jörg Kratz's enigmatic paintings invite the viewer to make a careful observation of fleeting appearances. The painter from the Rhineland does not seek simply to reproduce nature, but to capture its fleeting essence, that part of unspeakable mystery that floats in the damp air of a still mauve morning, in greenish twilights or blue nights.

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Text by: Enzo Menuge

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Jörg Kratz (Born in 1987 à Haan - Germany )

Jörg Kratz graduated from the Kunstakademie Münster in 2017 after studying philosophy and art history at the University of Düsseldorf. He lives and works between Haan and Cologne.

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The artist's work has been shown regularly in numerous group exhibitions in Europe, notably in Germany, with Galerie Conrads in Berlin and at KIT - Kunst im Tunnel in Düsseldorf. He has recently presented his work in Paris at Galerie Elsa Meunier and Galerie Mathilde Le Coz, in a duo show with Welsh painter Dylan Williams entitled Bright Night. Jörg Kratz has also exhibited in England (Warbling, London), Chile (TIM Arte Conemporáneo) and the United States (Galerie Philia, New York)...

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The artist has had an institutional exhibition in 2023 at the Museum Wilhelm Morgner in Soest, titled The Moon Sleeps Sailing, in dialogue with the works of Javkhlan Ariunbold.

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With Galerie Elsa Meunier and the Galerie Mathilde Le Coz, the artist is having his first solo show in Paris.

Galerie Elsa Meunier

15 rue Guénégaud, 75006 Paris

Contact | mathilde.m.lecoz@gmail.com

+33 (0)6 35 60 11 07 - @mathildemlecoz