Painting occupies a prominent place in the forthcoming edition of Luxembourg Art Week, where more than 70 galleries across the Main Section and Take Off offer a remarkably diverse panorama of contemporary artistic practices. Across oil, acrylic, tempera, graphite and mixed media, painting emerges not simply as a medium of representation, but as a dynamic field in which energy, thought and emotion intersect.
by Emanuela Mazzonis
A recurring tendency within this selection is the use of painting as a means of moving beyond the immediately visible. Through the distortion of space, the transformation of colour, the evocation of memory, or the construction of imagined environments, artists invite the viewer to enter spaces that exist somewhere between reality and fiction, observation and memory, the tangible and the imagined.
The absence of the human figure is striking in many of these works: rather than depicting the individual directly, artists evoke human presence through domestic spaces, architecture, landscapes and objects, allowing the viewer's imagination to inhabit the image.
At Sobering Galerie, Paris, a significant selection of international painters explores this territory through intimate scenes drawn from everyday life. Kate Lewis, Ivan Arlaud, Julien Lischka and Thomas Andréa Barbey transform domestic interiors and still lifes (tables, books, flowers, cups, windows and textiles) into luminous and highly personal pictorial compositions. Drawing on the legacies of Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne and French Pointillism, their paintings create a suspended atmosphere in which ordinary objects become vehicles for memory, imagination and personal narrative. The absence of human figures does not diminish their presence; rather, it makes the domestic environment a space of psychological projection.
This displacement of the human figure is equally evident in the work of Marcelo Fuentes (Alzueta Gallery, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Casavells) and Leif Trenkler (Galerie Schortgen, Luxembourg). Fuentes focuses on architecture as a threshold between what is immediately visible and what remains concealed. His buildings, sometimes observed from reality and sometimes imagined, appear as empty or abandoned spaces, reflecting the city as a psychological landscape. Trenkler, by contrast, constructs vibrant environments populated by sunny colours and meticulously rendered details. His scenes evoke leisure and pleasure, producing a sense of optimism and celebration while remaining entirely devoid of human figures.
The relationship between the imagined and the natural world is central to Aharon Gluska’s Imagined Landscapes (Lazarew – de Pontcharra, Paris). His compositions begin with an attempt to reproduce the materiality of landscape through water, earth pigments and ink. By immersing paper in successive water baths, Gluska evokes the slow formation of natural matter, particularly mineral structures. Landscape thus becomes not simply something represented, but something physically enacted through the process of making.
The environmental dimension is also present in Mathias Kessler’s charcoal drawings (Galerie Heike Strelow, Frankfurt), where image-making becomes a form of documentation. Revisiting Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic Wanderer above the Sea of Fog as both a historical and climatic reference, Kessler reconstructs the gradual transformation of the landscape between 1824 and 2024, drawing on two centuries of climate data. The resulting works establish a powerful dialogue between the sublime landscape of Romanticism and the altered environmental conditions of the present, suggesting how aesthetic experience can become a vehicle for ecological awareness.
The question of transformation takes a more material and intimate form in the work of Sophie Ko (Munhoven & Riff, Saint-Denis, Strasbourg). Exploring the relationship between image and memory, Ko works with fragile and unstable substances, particularly pigments and ashes produced from burned images. Her works remain in a state of potential transformation, making the passage of time an active component of the artistic process. They can be understood as fragile landscapes of memory, in which matter carries traces of both personal experience and cultural history.
A similar tension between permanence and disappearance characterises the work of Alessandro Piangiamore (Nathan Chiche, Paris, Metz). His practice investigates nature, transformation and the unstable boundary between appearance and reality. In Ieri Ikebana, flowers are embedded in concrete, preserving their delicate forms while simultaneously transforming them into permanent objects. The encounter between organic fragility and the apparent permanence of the material creates a poetic tension between nature and artifice, transience and permanence, reality and imagination.
The work of French artist Flo Arnold (AA Gallery, Casablanca) similarly occupies a space between contemplation and introspection, mutation and permanence, nature and architecture. Through luminous compositions and spatial works, she evokes processes of organic growth, levitation and transformation. Colour itself becomes a vehicle for movement, suggesting forms that are constantly evolving between material and immaterial states.
In the work of Robert Pan (Alessandro Casciaro, Bolzano), transformation takes place through the physical behaviour of colour. Numerous layers of pigment are sealed within resin and polished, producing surfaces in which opacity and transparency continuously interact. Light seems to move through the compositions, destabilising their physical presence and leading the viewer beyond the realm of the tangible, towards an open field of imagination and fantasy.
If these practices expand painting towards the poetic and the imaginary, another group of artists brings perception back towards structure, order and systems. Their work engages with algorithmic thinking, repetition and the geometric rhythm of forms, revealing another dimension of contemporary painting and drawing: one in which intuition encounters systems of organisation.
Finally, Liane Mathes Rabbath (no/mad utopia, Beirut) transforms delicate surfaces into highly structured geometric compositions. Combining intricate forms with oil and acrylic colour, her work moves between Eastern decorative traditions and contemporary abstraction. Architectural details, Islamic patterns, church ornamentation and the visual culture of Lebanon become sources for a language in which geometry, colour and ornament are reconfigured through a contemporary sensibility.
Across these diverse approaches, painting emerges as far more than a return to a traditional medium. It becomes a space of experimentation in which perception can be slowed down, disrupted or reorganised. Some artists use colour, matter and the memory of landscape to open the image towards dream and speculation; others employ systems, geometry and algorithms to question how order itself is constructed.
The painted image can still transform the way we see, by creating spaces in which reality is not given, but continuously imagined, reconstructed and reinterpreted.