Meditate with Félix Vallotton (1865

This ray of sunshine which pierces the darkness of a shadow of dark trees has caravan tunes. Indeed, in The vocation of Saint Matthew (1599), this immense painting that can be contemplated in a side chapel of the Saint-Louis-des-Français church in Rome (Italy), it is also a rai of light that springs from the heights to the right of The work to pour out, lower left, on a group of busy men around a table. Among them, a tax collector, although taken in his accounts, will soon be grasped from the inside by this decisive light.

But, three centuries later, in the work of the Franco-Swiss painter Félix Vallotton who takes up this pictorial scheme, no conversion of this kind is in sight. With the strength of the Nabis school, these spiritualist painters who succeeded the Impressionists, the artist highlights only a discreet undergrowth. But it is a red and green soil that springs so, like a bleeding of life in a monotonous world. A small wooden gate can be guessed in the distance, opening a passage in the stone wall that barks the horizon. The sky, hampered in a tiny breach, has golden and mauve shades, bringing out a tender and joyful green in the heavy leaves of the plane trees. Between concern and hope, the work invites us to contemplation. Just what it takes for a conversion to work … in the dark undergrowth of our being.