French painter Loïc Le Groumellec is showing his latest work at Galerie Daniel Templon: three monumental black and white triptychs, and, for the first time, a new series of paintings in which he introduced colour.

Born in 1957, Loïc Le Groumellec made his name with his iterative minimalist paintings whose shadowy shapes cast by megaliths and houses constitute a language of their own, almost an obsession. He has been ceaselessly exploring these themes for the past thirty years, creating a body of work almost series-like in nature and that speaks to us of a quest for utter perfection.

A world that is both sober and mystical emerges from the strangely luminous surfaces of the paintings, an effect achieved by the progressive removal of the black lacquer. In the words of Itzhak Goldberg, writing in the 2008 catalogue: “The artist’s uncompromising ‘minimalism’ operates without his knowledge, or rather, this is an expressive minimalism that does, nonetheless, always sustain its muted tone.”

Although Loïc Le Groumellec’s work up until now has explored a limited colour range, comprising greys and blacks, his latest work has taken a radical new direction with the introduction of colour. The artist chooses a potent colour that he applies flat, working monochromatically, from which emerges an abstract iconography that echoes the runic alphabet of the Celts.