Opening reception: Saturday, November 8, 2025 from 3 to 5 p.m.
Christine Nobel: Notes cosmiques
Text by Chloe Kinsella
Christine Nobel’s latest exhibition, Notes Cosmiques, translates the act of painting into a form of cosmic notation. Nobel views colour not as static hues but as energy oscillating, orbiting, and colliding across the picture plane with the quiet insistence of a breath or tide. Line, tone, and fields of colour mingle like celestial bodies in motion, generating meaning beyond representation. Nobel’s practice is methodical and iterative, grounded in a sustained engagement with tonal relationships, spatial rhythm, and the phenomenology of seeing. Through delicate strata of ink, acrylic, and pigments, each piece in Notes Cosmiques traces invisible geometries, radiating patterning that feels both structured and infinite.
Across the eleven works in this exhibition, translucent washes of colour diffuse light, forming veils that shift Nobel’s imagery in perceived scale and depth. Up close, each piece reveals intricate networks of mark-making, visual intervals that ripple across the progression of paintings. Denser pigments add gravity and contrast, while dynamic pointillism vibrates on the linen surfaces. From a distance, details coalesce around a subtle focal point, hinting at a gravitational centre within a celestial field. This tension between symmetry, micro-detail and vastness invites a hypnotic mode of looking, one where sustained attention transforms surfaces into space and alludes to frenetic energy bouncing between the series.
Nobel’s patterning gestures towards organic symmetry that is found throughout the natural world and the cosmos alike. Drawing on Paul Klee’s conception of colour as “an organic whole in motion” (The Thinking Eye, 1961), Nobel extends this theory into a contemporary language of fluid abstraction. Her chromatic fields appear to breathe, generating movement and rhythm that resonates as both spatial and temporal. Within this movement, pigments behave like pulses, vibrating through fields of light and shadow, guiding the viewer’s eye along elliptical trajectories that echo planetary paths and the beating of a heart.
Through this union of material and metaphysical inquiry, Nobel turns abstraction into an act of listening. Her paintings move in frequencies rather than gestures, calling on the viewer to slow down and tune in to the reverberations that unfold from work to work. Notes Cosmiques charts a cosmos that is both infinite and interior, suggesting that what may first appear as chaotic is, in fact, harmony unfolding on a scale beyond the immediately visible.
