Gardens is an exhibition of new paintings by Philippe Raphanel at Equinox Gallery, extending the artist’s long-standing engagement with the natural world into a focused meditation on the life of the garden. For over 30 years, Raphanel’s painting practice has been marked by an awareness and sensitivity to the natural landscape; in this new body of work, he turns toward the intimate, daily rituals of tending a garden as a way to think about time, place, and renewal.
Working with thinned paint and a highly layered process, Raphanel builds his images through delicate veils of colour that create a remarkable sense of depth with very little physical buildup on the surface. Each thin line is individually painted by hand, forming a subtle lattice that runs through the background—a structure that supports rather than competes with the flowers and foliage in the foreground, and that can suggest shafts of light, falling rain, or filtered sunrays. Iridescent pigments and alternatingly opaque and translucent layers allow the paintings to shift with the viewer’s position and in response to changing light, echoing his ongoing interest in atmospheric space and in imagery related to oceanic and celestial maps.