Michel Suret-Canale (XX-XXI) - Hommage silencieux à Nicolas de Staël, XL

"Silence" — Homage to Nicolas de Staël

Oil on canvas, 70 × 100 cm, Suret-Canale, 2025

With this ample and vibrant canvas, Michel Suret-Canale offers a deeply personal homage to Nicolas de Staël, not through imitation — which is impossible and unnecessary — but through a lively reinterpretation of a foundational gesture: the pursuit of a pictorial synthesis born from travel, drawing, and inner silence.

The work presents itself as a colorful architecture, built with thick layers, impastos, and sharp flat areas, where dark masses and luminous flashes are balanced. The blocks of colors — reds, ochres, blues, deep greens — are arranged like recomposed fragments of a mental landscape, both abstract and inhabited. In the center, a tiny detail catches the eye:
The silhouette of a man with his bicycle, an almost secret figure, deposited like a humble and discreet wink at a foundational episode in Staël's life.

Before becoming the painter of the chromatic density we know, Staël was a walker, a cyclist traveler, crossing war-torn Spain in 1936. This journey is not merely a biographical adventure: it was the moment when Staël, still very young, understood that the world is grasped neither through photography nor raw memory, but through tireless drawing.
During this journey, he fills notebook after notebook: cities in ruins, glimpsed silhouettes, jagged architectures, cut-out horizons. It is already here that the idea of a painting made of blocks, tensions, and essential masses begins to form, as if reality must be reconstructed by the hand, patiently, in the solitude of the stroke.

Suret-Canale is not trying here to reconstruct a style; it continues its momentum.
The canvas reads like a palimpsest of memory and painting, an inner map where each color is a place, each rectangle a step, each overlay an insistent memory. The Cyrillic inscription, 'tichina,' engraved into the material — тишина, 'silence' — lends the whole a metaphysical tone: the painting becomes a space of contemplation, a tribute to the absolute concentration that Staël demanded for her work and a nod to her Russian origin.

We can infer an implicit story within this composition.
The silence of the traveler
the vastness of the world he traverses
— the fragmentation of reality, that only painting can unify;
—and this tiny, stubborn, fragile cyclist, but moving forward with an almost spiritual determination.

This figure on a bicycle becomes the emblem of the painter's inner pilgrimage — that of Staël in the past, that of Suret-Canale today. It expresses what all painters know: that we travel to see, but we paint to understand.

In 'Silence', color is not decorative: it is matter-world, concentrated energy, a push of existence. The deep black at the top, the saturated blues, the dense yellows, the incandescent reds compose a kind of abrupt symphony, where light always ends up breaking through. The canvas thus retains something of Staël, but filtered through a decidedly contemporary language: more free, more narrative, more allusive.

‘Silence’ is thus both a tribute and a reaffirmation of the power of the gesture: to paint is to reconstruct reality from chaos; to move forward is to give meaning to fragments.

A powerful, vibrant piece that speaks as much of painting as of destiny.