Michel Suret-Canale (XX-XXI) - Juste une bouteille XL

Just a bottle — Oil on canvas, 2025

In this work titled 'Just a Bottle,' Michel Suret-Canale tackles a subject of almost provocative simplicity: a bottle, nothing more.
But it is precisely in this apparent insignificance that the strength of painting lies. For here, as with Morandi, Cézanne, or even Chardin, the motif is only a pretext — the real subject is the act of seeing, and the painter's ability to bring forth beauty from the most ordinary.

Suret-Canale places the bottle in majesty, at the center of a vibrant chromatic field, built with generous impastos, breaks of light, and powerful contrasts. The pictorial material, dense and stratified, gives the object an almost sculptural presence. Deep reds, stretched blues, luminous blacks compose a space where the bottle ceases to be an object and becomes a figure, a silent vertical that organizes the entire painting.

The painter adopts Rodin's famous phrase, who stated that 'it is not beauty that is lacking in our eyes, but our eyes that are lacking in beauty.'
Here, everything hinges on this shift of gaze: what was once believed to be simple, trivial, modest becomes a pictorial appearance, an event of painting. The viewer no longer sees a bottle: they see the painting revealing a bottle.

This canvas is also the culmination of a process that has been carefully developed over time. For more than fifty years, the artist has tirelessly revisited his themes, revising, refining, and reconstructing them. This is how painters of the École de Paris, whom he aligns with, proceed: through fidelity to the motif, honesty of vision, and a commitment to truth in form.
This painting bears the mark: a sure, jubilant work that testifies to the mastery of a painter who has reached full stylistic maturity.

Just a bottle is not just a nod to Morandi, Cézanne, or Chardin — it is a statement: anything can become great if you know how to look at it.
And everything becomes a painting the moment the painter decides to make it a world.

A very beautiful piece, strong, full, crafted, that will count in Michel Suret-Canale's 50 years of production.