G I L L E S M A R R E Y
The Shift | May 28 - June 21 | St. Helena
The Shift
May 28 - June 21 | St. Helena
From the remnants of day to the onset of night, this uncertain passage has long served as both a pictorial and poetic subject for Gilles Marrey. It is a convergence of sensations and emotions: the melancholy of fading light alongside the quiet comfort of soft violet shadows spreading across façades. What was once distinct and legible gradually becomes blurred and indistinct. Day reveals; night suggests.
Yet the sky remains luminous. Though the sun has slipped below the horizon, its light continues to illuminate the clouds while night slowly overtakes the city. Shadows lengthen and expand, swallowing the final traces of daylight. In only a few moments, the “shift” has taken place.
Entangled throughout the day, light and shadow begin to separate, each gathering within its own territory: the sky for one, the earth for the other. We often say that “night falls,” though in truth it seems to rise from the ground like a flood, gradually submerging the city. This terrestrial twilight becomes illuminated by countless artificial lights—street lamps, neon signs, headlights, shop windows, cafés, restaurants, and apartment windows flickering on at dusk—small points of brilliance suspended within the darkness like stars in an inverted night sky. It is these fleeting yet emotionally charged moments that Marrey seeks to capture.
He spent extensive time drawing San Francisco and its surrounding landscapes directly from observation. Drawing on site became an act of absorption through which the structure, morphology, and character of the city gradually revealed themselves, resulting in works that function as both urban landscapes and portraits of place.
One of the enduring strengths of drawing lies in this prolonged engagement with reality. A drawing begun in late afternoon and continued through nightfall, allowing him to witness the gradual emergence of darkness in all its subtle transformations—or more precisely, the way it slowly engulfs detail.
For Marrey, a drawing is not simply a document of space, but a reservoir of memory that preserves the slow transformations of light upon that space. The passing hours imprint themselves upon memory as deeply as perspective, proportion, and the hierarchy of detail.
As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously observed, “What I have not drawn, I have not seen.”
These collected impressions are later reinterpreted through painting, where color, texture, scale, and composition transform the underlying structure of the drawing. The extended duration of painting introduces further shifts and possibilities. During the creation of an urban scene or landscape, the work may branch toward different resolutions—another perspective, another atmosphere, another hour of the day.
The Albion’s Corner paintings and the Nob Hill day-and-night works emerged from this desire to create nocturnal counterparts to sunlit streets, or to explore subtle variations in perspective and framing, as though the viewer had shifted slightly in order to more fully contemplate the passage from day into night.
From the remnants of day to the onset of night, this uncertain passage has long served as both a pictorial and poetic subject for Gilles Marrey. It is a convergence of sensations and emotions: the melancholy of fading light alongside the quiet comfort of soft violet shadows spreading across façades. What was once distinct and legible gradually becomes blurred and indistinct. Day reveals; night suggests.
Yet the sky remains luminous. Though the sun has slipped below the horizon, its light continues to illuminate the clouds while night slowly overtakes the city. Shadows lengthen and expand, swallowing the final traces of daylight. In only a few moments, the “shift” has taken place.
Entangled throughout the day, light and shadow begin to separate, each gathering within its own territory: the sky for one, the earth for the other. We often say that “night falls,” though in truth it seems to rise from the ground like a flood, gradually submerging the city. This terrestrial twilight becomes illuminated by countless artificial lights—street lamps, neon signs, headlights, shop windows, cafés, restaurants, and apartment windows flickering on at dusk—small points of brilliance suspended within the darkness like stars in an inverted night sky. It is these fleeting yet emotionally charged moments that Marrey seeks to capture.
He spent extensive time drawing San Francisco and its surrounding landscapes directly from observation. Drawing on site became an act of absorption through which the structure, morphology, and character of the city gradually revealed themselves, resulting in works that function as both urban landscapes and portraits of place.
One of the enduring strengths of drawing lies in this prolonged engagement with reality. A drawing begun in late afternoon and continued through nightfall, allowing him to witness the gradual emergence of darkness in all its subtle transformations—or more precisely, the way it slowly engulfs detail.
For Marrey, a drawing is not simply a document of space, but a reservoir of memory that preserves the slow transformations of light upon that space. The passing hours imprint themselves upon memory as deeply as perspective, proportion, and the hierarchy of detail.
As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famously observed, “What I have not drawn, I have not seen.”
These collected impressions are later reinterpreted through painting, where color, texture, scale, and composition transform the underlying structure of the drawing. The extended duration of painting introduces further shifts and possibilities. During the creation of an urban scene or landscape, the work may branch toward different resolutions—another perspective, another atmosphere, another hour of the day.
The Albion’s Corner paintings and the Nob Hill day-and-night works emerged from this desire to create nocturnal counterparts to sunlit streets, or to explore subtle variations in perspective and framing, as though the viewer had shifted slightly in order to more fully contemplate the passage from day into night.
Gilles Marrey’s paintings are rooted in a deep observation of contemporary life, transforming city streets, neighborhoods, and landscapes into evocative studies of light, atmosphere, and place. Speaking about his process, Marrey notes, “When I paint, I’m always searching for the right balance of light, composition, and color. When all three come together, I know the painting has something special.” This pursuit of harmony underlies works that feel at once familiar and emotionally resonant, capturing not only the appearance of a location but its unique character and mood.
Educated in France during the height of postmodernism and minimalism, Marrey forged an independent path, drawing inspiration from artists such as Gauguin, Vuillard, and Manet while remaining committed to a distinctly contemporary realism. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout France and internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen and the MAMUT Art Center. For many years, he has also served as a professor at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and the National School of Architecture in Paris-Belleville.
