TROPICAL LOIRE
In La Loire tropicale, Patrick Santoni composes a series that resembles a fragmented narrative, an imaginary atlas of a metamorphosed river. Each canvas becomes a chapter, a variation on the horizon and its transformations, where the Loire, a river strongly linked to French identity, is reconfigured in a climate that is no longer its own. The collection acts as a musical suite, playing on repetitions, ruptures, and silences.
The tropical Loire dialogues as much with American abstract painting as with the recomposed landscapes of French Narrative Figuration. It also joins conceptual approaches that question territory as a political construct: from On Kawara to Francis Alÿs, many artists have made place a subject for thought. Santoni radicalizes the gesture of landscape by reducing it to its simplest expression: a visual field that becomes a concept. He makes it a singular terrain, both poetic and political. By painting the Loire as a displaced, tropicalized river, Patrick Santoni deploys a gesture that questions the future of our environments and the imaginary we associate with them. He does not simply paint a place: he paints a concern, a possible future, a critical vision of our present.
