Mountains
2023
Soft pastel on linen
160 x 220 x 3.8 cm
Nicolas Party (born in 1980) is renowned for his boldly coloured portraits, still-lifes, and landscapes, which he renders in an immediately recognisable and idiosyncratic style. Born in Lausanne, Party spent his childhood enveloped in Switzerland’s picturesque natural scenery, an experience that led to a lifelong fascination with the landscape. Drawing on a range of art historical references – from 19th Century Swiss landscape artists to Chinese shan shui painting – Party challenges and celebrates traditional conventions of representational image-making. With its soft blue peaks and yolky yellow background, ‘Mountains’ (2023) is a remarkable synthesis of these influences.
While ‘Mountains’ represents a new facet of his practice, examples of Party’s landscapes and environmental works can be found in renowned museum collections around the world, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, among others. The long history of landscape painting has been an enduring source of inspiration for Party, particularly movements and artists who toed the boundary between abstraction and figuration. The present work captures the influence of Ferdinand Hodler, who elegantly synthesised traditional landscape painting and modernism. In ‘Mountains’, Party used layering and colour to produce depth, which he framed against a bright yellow backdrop. Discussing his approach to these paintings, Party noted: “When I paint a landscape, I’m trying to find the moment where an element that is recognisable […] becomes a shape.”
Party chose pastel as his medium for these monumental landscapes. He first used pastel in 2013 and was quickly enamoured by the delicacy of the medium and its physicality. Party works with extreme precision, applying and smudging the pastel with his fingertips. Reflecting on pastel’s immediacy, Party noted: “You can layer and layer, but you can’t start over. The nature of the medium is much more direct. Nothing dries or is wet – it stays exactly how it is.“ When pastel was first popularised in France in the mid-18th Century, its detractors decried it for being too temporary to use in serious painting – a criticism quickly proven incorrect. Party references this historical conflict in ‘Mountains’, capturing an ephemeral moment in the day using a medium with a history of impermanence. Under Party’s careful hand, the landscape is rendered on a monumental scale that asserts the permanence of this sublime vista.