Arienne Lepretre

Painting is a language Arienne began to learn at a young age, with her first oil painting class in the Beirut of her childhood. Through a nomadic upbringing of different cultures, languages, geography, her art served to center her - it became her. She took in the landscapes of Los Angeles, Switzerland, Hamburg, London, Nairobi and Dallas. And these places and spaces formed the foundation for her visual language. Initially, so too, did her father’s architectural practice. His extemporaneous sketches of fantastic buildings on little cocktail napkins, with the pen bleeding into the texture of the napkin, held fascination for her as a free-associative process. It was these quick, fleeting sketches that introduced her to modernism and its spontaneity. Her paintings and drawings function as family or tribes of works in dialogue with one another. She thinks of each work as a unique investigation and work intuitively and impulsively at first, later taking a step back to consider the work formally and critically, then she engages with the work again relying on an immediate intuitive response to either disrupt, erase, provoke or entice. As art critic Barry Schwabsky notes, “A landscape painting is not necessarily a representation of a landscape, but rather something that, in being constructed out of pieces of representation, or possibly just echoes of former representations, kindles an experience of its own — one that, as those fragments of resemblance suggest, is somehow like an experience of nature.”