Pierre Picot | Seeking Home—Full Speed into the Fog
June 28 - August 9, 2025
Opening Reception: June 28, 4-6pm
Pierre Picot (1941 - 2021) was a Franco-American artist raised in Paris before moving to Los Angeles, where he studied art at UCLA under Ed Ruscha and William Brice. He entered the legendary graduate department of Cal Arts in the early 1970s, and later published his own free newspaper, Art In LA. Elements of landscape always found their way into Picot’s work, but a teaching stint at the Pont Aven School of Contemporary Art in France in 2006 prompted an epiphany, when he discovered the Bois d’Amour and became fully immersed in lush nature for the first time. He wet his brushes with raindrops and developed a pictorial language with Chinese black ink that combined intense horizons packed with clouds and pointy mountains—an almost comic sublime. When they moved back to France from L.A. in 2012, he and his wife Wendy rented a wing of an 18th century chateau on the coast of Brittany, and Picot once again became immersed in a landscape—this time one that always seemed to be at the mercy of winds, storms, and abrupt shifts in weather. This climate was embodied in paintings with whooshes of swirling wind, and long, unraveling mountains. Rivers meander like those on a Chinese scroll, and mounds of rock have the animated oddness of Philip Guston’s lugubrious shoes.
The exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, Seeking Home—Full Speed into the Fog, includes a number of Picot’s last paintings focusing on boats, docks, and seascapes. The palette is subdued, with stylized elongations as well as skeins and scumbles of black that recall Bernard Buffet, a French artist whose star fell from grace in the late 1950s; he became an “outsider,” the kind of artist Pierre admired. These last paintings are complemented by other nautical adventures in Pierre’s oeuvre such as his fleet of tiny cardboard ships painted in drippy white, a collection of pareidolia driftwood, and further excursions into his romantic, tempestuous landscapes.