UNLIKELY LANDSCAPE.

There was this woman sitting, watching us in a setting without reference. Now, she has disappeared, as if the world had emptied out. All that remains is a space before or after Man. What has happened to time? Our time?

Today, this is the place that fills the painting. Faces, eyes and pirogues have been deleted and replaced with monoliths. Like the seated woman, their presence seems to question us. Monoliths standing alone or in incantatory order, these hieratic figures rise like an echo of a missing reality.

recurrent theme that appeared towards the end of the 80s, they speak of foresakeness and absence. As if they alone survived time, as if Man had failed in his attempt to make the world more habitable. Luckily the stones remain - often a ritual circle - the shadow of the stones, the water, the silence and this tree whose roots have left the earth but continue to grow - inalterable Sisyphus - like a homage to the light, an invitation to rebirth.

Sometimes, a stark gesture allows the paint to run and choose its forms. Sometimes the expert hand flushes out reality in its finiteness.
Gérard Omez likes to wander through the yesterday and today of painting.

What Paul Valéry wrote of the sea could be said of his paintings: "The sea, the sea, always starting over." It was to start over that Omez tore up his lexicon seeking images that will describe the elsewhere, the ill-being, the ever-postponed tenderness.