Annette de Mestre - Paintings

Night Revelations

All things are born out of darkness. Night revelations looks into the unknown. Sees in the darkness a life filled with revelations that is hidden therein. The paintings depict a hiddenness to be imagined, to be extracted. There is a luminosity that is held within these semicircular to circular shapes. They reflect a kind of truth that you know is there yet can't be translated into words. It is looming, it is distant, it is near. It's a profound presence which invites vou. It makes vou switch off the dim light of one's mind and turn on a luminous darkness of something other. It leads you on an ever-on-going quest, of undictated revelations. It is as though these paintings are digging deep, revealing unexpected treasures. These nightly paintings enlighten, enrich, offering unexpected extraction. This is like being a gold miner or a sower of seeds. What emerges, is hidden. Hopefully you will see the beautifull invisible concealed within.

Neti's paintings depict the sacred space within all of us.

It is paradoxical shape-scape resembling hills and planets of our own inner dark night. It feels very of our day. Neti seems to be creating a living prayerful darkness. There are glimmers, streaks, haloes of light, hope and a sense of something stirring. In each work there is a kind of epiphany that wants to shake us up and awaken us. Ultimately, it feels that darkness and light are working together. It is as if these paintings depict a density and depth that can be found in the unknowing, the very blackness itself. For this reason I find these paintings profoundly inspire me to walk into them and find the hidden beneath, behind and within.

- Hugo Colville

Night Revelations Oil on canvas, 90 x 122cm

Chinks of Knowing Oil on canvas, 61 x 61cm

Gold Dust Oil on canvas, 61 x 76cm

The Breakthrough Oil on canvas, 122 x 183cm

Haloed Mount Oil on canvas, 61 x 61cm

Drawn Together Oil on canvas, 92 x 92cm

The Mountain Stands Strong Oil on canvas, 92 x 92cm

Awakening Oil on canvas, 61 x 61cm

Circle of Light Oil on canvas, 59 x 48cm

Out of the Blue Oil on canvas, 51 x 51cm

First Light Oil on canvas, 61 x 122cm

Lifting the Veil Oil on canvas, 51 x 51cm

Held in the Night No.1 Oil on canvas, 51 x 51cm

Held in the Night No.2 Oil on canvas, 64 x 54cm

Night Owl Oil on canvas, 64 x 80cm

Pointing the Way Oil on canvas, 44 x 44cm

SOLD

On the Edge Oil on canvas, 25 x 36cm

No. 1 Oil on paper

No. 2 Oil on paper

No.4 Oil on paper

No.3 Oil on paper

Sleep is hugged by black.

Against this black

stars shine.

Black is boundless.

The imagination races in the dark.

In the black coal, fire lives,

the spirit lives.

In the pitchy black we dream and our spirit soars.

Inklings, figments of the land's imagining.

Nothing there - all imagined,

in the cusp of something, something other,

something else.

'We look not at things which are seen - for the things that are seen are temporal.

but the things which are not seen, are eternal.' Corinthians 4.18

It’s as though we see things from things not seen.

We dwell in paintings of stillness -

no one there, nothing there,

but something like a hum does linger on.

It is calling me from the depth

into its silence.

- Hugo Colville

THE BANDAGED EARTH

Annette de Mestre is reaching out, looking for, with ever more intensity, the essence of matter and what seems to matter. The paintings are grounded in light and darkness, beginnings and endings, the here and the beyond, a setting and rising. Hope always seems to be cracking, crackling through, at each paint stroke with a feeling of courage and desire to touch the unknown.

It is, surely, this kind of painterly journey which opens the heart and mind to what marks on canvas or paper can point to. It is as if, just the textures and layers, catch something of our beingness in it all. It is playing with the boundaries, the betweens, of the earthly and the celestial, with low tones showing us the way.

Hugo Colville

The Bandaged Earth Oil on canvas

Let us not be Deterred

SOLD

Grounded in the Beyond

Weatherbeaten Hope.

SOLD

Fertile Beginnings £7500 15cm x 100cm. oil on canvas

Let there Be Light £7500. 150cm x 100cm. oil on canvas

Softly Hovering There

SOLD

Deep Attraction of Light and Dark, oil on paper, £2000. 48 x 59cm

Rising from a Bed of Darkness, oil on paper, £2000. 48 x 59cm

Crackling Light, oil on canvas, oil on canvas. £4000 64 x 49cm

Dark Hope oil on canvas 64 x 80cm

SOLD

Fertile Blush, oil on canvas £2000. 45cm x 45cm. oil on canvas

SOLD

In Touch with the Unknown, oil on canvas 45 x 45cm

SOLD

In the Dawn of Time. £7500. oil on canvas 105cm x 100cm

Moonlit Mirage.

SOLD

MOONS

Annette de Mestre is best known for her dark and deeply spiritual paintings, often depicting pilgrims on their journeys or monks in contemplation. But in her latest series including Wrapped in Mystery, Suspended in Silence, Touch Down, Presence in the Dawn and Born out of Darkness, her monistic figurativism is replaced by flatter more abstract works that use a bright circle or moon to light up simple forms and figures. The closer you look at these paintings though the more you experience a richness of surface and a complexity of colour and texture reflecting years of experience working with oil paint. The scratched and patch worked surfaces of her moons could even echo the pitted surface of the lunar surface itself.

The use of the moon to imbue soft romantic light across a landscape is not new in art history but in de Mestre's paintings the moon is all powerful and almost the subject of the picture itself. This intensity is magnified by her use of gold paint and its juxtaposition to dark blue, grey and black tones. Any melancholy resulting from the darkness, however, is offset by the warmth and optimism of the moons yellow glow. De Mestre's use of gold, whilst reminding us of the gold of religious frescoes is less about the hierarchy and authority of the church and much more about creating an intense light source to illuminate her surfaces and intrigue the viewer.

These beautiful new works, are in essence, stripped down narratives depicting simple iconic objects and shapes that perhaps reflect a desire for humble living and a sense of what is essential. Although there is a feeling of the divine, the subject is essentially light. Not just the intense physical glow that emanates from the skillful use of gold leaf and layers of yellow oil paint but a light that gives a sense of hope, mystery and who knows, maybe even guidance.

Mike Perry