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See more works by Hubert Oddo
About Hubert Oddo :
Hubert Oddo’s work explores the relationships between color and material, their tensions and resonances. His paintings are built through successive layers of pigment and matter, oil, sand, plaster, until a state of balance emerges.
His work is included in numerous private and public collections in France and the United States.
Hubert Oddo, or the Pull of Abstraction
When we speak of abstraction in painting, we should always remember that, for most children who experiment with graphic arts, an abstract expression of the world comes before its figurative description. Hubert Oddo has never ceased wanting to return to that childhood of art. Already in his earliest compositions, at the beginning of the 1980s, one could quite clearly discern a tendency to geometrize space, a neo-Cubist treatment of forms and chromatic masses. Since then, he has only gone further along this path, striving to translate atmospheres and rhythms pictorially, while entrusting drawing (to which we shall return) with his taste for arabesque and lively line.
Facing his stretcher and blank canvas, deep in his studio, he lets his emotions and memories flow in. Once the orientation of the painting (vertical or horizontal) has been decided, the dance of colors begins. They are what reflect and convey his emotions, according to a personal system of signs and codes. A dominant color soon emerges, drawing its complementary hues along with it by association.
Using the brush as well as the roller and the squeegee, the artist reworks the surface of the canvas layer after layer, creating a true palimpsest to which he meticulously adds sand (always gathered from the beach at Le Prophète), runs of paint, and splashes. Sometimes it is a detail that Hubert Oddo reworks tirelessly until it becomes a central motif. And it is only the intuitive sense that he has, once again, achieved that elegance of art which leads him to admit that the painting is finished. Then the age-old question about the mystery of creation can begin anew—both for him and for the many visitors who step through the door of his studio.
Alongside his abstract oils—small, medium, and large formats that form as many milestones in his essentialist quest—Hubert Oddo draws with enthusiasm. An intimate theater constantly reinvented, his variations on a deliberately unfinished female body also serve as a pretext for other technical experiments (such as the combination of oil and pastel, in particular).
Sculpture offers yet another field of study and application for this voracious creator. More inclined toward working directly with the material (wood, stone) than toward sophisticated assemblages, he often finds there figures akin to those that inhabit his paintings.