Vicky Colombet did not wait to work at the Marmottan museum in order to save a place or, even better, a role for his work in her own. How not to engage with such a painter when the word “landscape” finds itself at the heart of one’s work? How, above all, when haunted, as she is, by this ongoing tragedy known as global warming, of which nature is both the target and the trace? How not to see in Claude Monet’s paintings the proof of a splendor that is now lost? It is not a question of imitating Monet. That would make no sense—neither pictorially, because this would be tantamount to being enslaved by a model, nor historically, because it would be like denying this loss before our eyes. It is a question of learning through Monet. To learn to paint not like him, not according to him, but rather with him, in order, in turn, to welcome, with the same openness, the world’s beauty, or what is left of it. Vicky Colombet’s Monet series, Water and Light and From the Floating World are manifestations of the quest for a common sensibility with this master of waterscapes[1]. Never, though, does she proceed by literally citing him, preferring to progress alongside the painter rather than to come to a standstill opposite him. Her most recent paintings, which give this relationship a new shape—less allusive than usual—allow us to understand what the Giverny painter’s art can bring her in terms of fecundity.

[1] The painter used the term paysages d’eau, or waterscapes, in the first exhibition of his water lilies at the gallery Durand-Ruel in 1900.