Olivier Masmonteil: painting the landscape, then exploring the invisible

Olivier Masmonteil, Sans titre 5, 2024, Huile sur toile, 180x160cm

Extensive interview followed by portfolio review: painter Olivier Masmonteil looks back on the three major phases of his artistic life — from his apprenticeship to the “destruction” of painting — and his quest for a pictorial language capable of capturing not only the visible landscape, but also what lies beneath it, echoing the profound transformations of the world around him.

Olivier Masmonteil, born in 1973 in Romilly-sur-Seine, is one of the most unique French painters of his generation. Based in Paris, he draws inspiration from his childhood in Corrèze and his almost constant travels. Long identified as a ‘landscape painter,’ he has turned this seemingly academic genre into a veritable laboratory where intimate memories, art history and fantasies of the horizon are replayed. Trained at the Académie Jacques Gabriel Chevalier in Brive and then at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, Olivier Masmonteil persisted in painting even when he was told he would soon die, claiming a scrupulous, technical craft, patiently built up over time. His landscapes, often composed from memory, function as sensitive cartographies where memories of Corrèze, reminiscences of long journeys and indirect references to the great masters, from classical painting to the modern avant-garde, are superimposed.

Since 2012, the artist has broadened his scope to other genres – portraiture, nudes, still lifes – while continuing to revisit the collective memory of painting through vast series, like chapters in an ongoing pictorial novel. Remaining faithful to figurative art but working with layers, collages and shifts in scale, he composes images in which the horizon becomes a motif, a vanishing point and a philosophical question, inviting the viewer to inhabit the painting rather than contemplate it from a distance.

His recent exhibition ‘Parfois j'ai peint le paysage’ (Sometimes I painted the landscape), presented from November 2024 to January 2025 in the Salons Aguado of the Hôtel d'Augny in Paris, continued this reflection on the persistence of landscape in the contemporary era: far from the postcard, the canvas becomes a territory of experimentation where the desire to paint, doubt, and the stubborn joy of continuing to look at the world confront each other.

Olivier Masmonteil in his Paris studio, March 2019. Photo by Frédéric Elin.

INTERVIEW

Isabelle Favre - You believe that an artist's life, particularly that of a painter, is built in three stages. Is this also true for you?

Olivier Masmonteil - In my own story, I see three chapters. Chapter 1, the possibility of painting. Chapter 2, the pleasure of painting, and Chapter 3, destroying painting. I have observed these three stages in the life of a painter in the great artists I admire. With Titian (who died in 1576 in Venice), it began with his apprenticeship with Bellini, the first chapter of the possibility of painting. Then he became the greatest Mannerist painter in Venice: this was the second phase. Finally, in the third phase, his palette darkened: he lost his son, and Venice was ravaged by the plague. We sense that something else was inhabiting him.

In the 19th century: Claude Monet. During his apprenticeship with Eugène Boudin, he was introduced to outdoor painting. Then began the great Impressionist phase. At the age of 50, the series appeared: haystacks, Rouen cathedrals, the bends of the Seine, and then, of course, the water lilies: we sense that there is another concern in his painting.

Closer to home, Pierre Soulages: after a period of apprenticeship, then a period of lyrical abstraction, the Outrenoirs

I also found these three phases of life in the parable of the camel, the lion and the child told by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: first, the camel's journey through the desert, with its culture and education. Then comes the lion phase, the phase where we address the world with a feeling of omnipotence. And then, in the last phase, the child must kill the lion in order to rediscover, in a way, the innocence of the beginning. We find the notion of eternal return...

In concrete terms, how did you approach these three chapters?

Olivier Masmonteil - Initially, with my original landscape; I grew up in Limousin, in a village near Tulle, Saint-Fortunade. It was the landscape around me that inspired me, I did a lot of fly fishing: there were rivers, waterfalls, skies. I learned to paint by looking at the landscape.

Then, after my first exhibitions, I wanted to understand the language of painting by studying that of the greatest painters. I began to draw inspiration from them, copying some, working in a profusion of subjects and painting styles.

Finally, in 2024, I felt the need to evolve my painting once again, to go a little further, and I realised that I was entering chapter 3, which I call ‘Destroying painting’. I find that this ultimately corresponds well with my current attitude towards landscape, a more sensory attitude towards the invisible aspects of landscape, which forces me to destroy everything I have learned.

Destroying landscape in painting, but is there an underlying idea about the evolution of the landscape around you?

Olivier Masmonteil - Yes, I'm approaching this period in my work at a time when the world is collapsing around me, that is to say, the rivers where I learned to fish are disappearing; little by little, they are losing their life. The Dordogne River, where I fished a lot, is disappearing. There are no more insects, no more fish. It's very sad. Some of the rivers where I learned to fish with my grandfather have completely disappeared; they've dried up.

Some trees are dying. Inevitably, my relationship with the landscape is changing. That's my subject, and my subject is dying. So I paint it in a more sensory way, seeking the invisible aspects of the landscape. It's a change of motif: from a visible motif, the tree, the river, the waterfalls, to an invisible motif, the wind, the heat, a form of light, motifs that are much less tangible, difficult to represent, either with photography or with painting. Music has been able to represent it, classically Vivaldi's The Four Seasons: when you listen to this music, you hear, you ‘see’ spring, but it is not a visible representation.

Are you trying to represent these invisible figures?

Olivier Masmonteil - In fact, it's more of a presence than a figure or a representation. We sense that there may be a character in the painting, we sense that there may be a river, but it is not materialised by what represents it. It is materialised by the emotion it can provoke, by colours. Suddenly, one colour becomes more liquid, another colour more material. And oil painting allows that. To achieve this, it took me 25 years of painting to understand the tools of painting and, at the same time, to understand how to represent things from the invisible world.

You have painted a lot in series, and even several series at once. Can you describe this way of working?

Olivier Masmonteil - First of all, there are technical reasons: oil paint takes a certain amount of time to dry, so every time I work on a painting, I have to wait a week or ten days before I can pick it up again. This gives me time to start others. These series evolve according to the format and what I am trying to evoke: some series are more about the night, others are more about a season or a type of environment. I usually start several at once, five or six paintings in a series. Often, working on several paintings at the same time means that the paintings feed off each other. A solution I've found on one painting, I test on another; an accident that happened on one painting can make something else appear on a painting next to it. Working on several paintings at the same time, in different formats, allows me to explore a subject in different ways.

Are you saying that a painter spends more time looking at their painting than painting it?

Olivier Masmonteil - In painting, the actual time spent working is very short compared to the time spent thinking and observing. Again, it's a technical issue because you have to let it dry. But that's not all. No, not only that. When a painting seems finished, I usually hide it so I don't see it for 10 days. Because it's a way of letting it rest a little, and when I turn it over to look at it again, elements stand out that need to be changed, or conversely, I say to myself, ‘Now it's finished, everything works correctly.’

You mentioned the different sizes of the canvases you work on. What do these differences create?

Olivier Masmonteil - I classify paintings into three sizes: those smaller than me, those larger than me, and those that are my size. The ones smaller than me are 50 cm by 60 cm maximum. With these paintings, you have a more intellectual relationship; you sit in front of the canvas, as if you were writing, you intellectualise much more, you have to use much less material, so more subtle things happen. In the paintings that are larger than me, we are totally immersed; these paintings involve the body, it's almost like dancing in front of the painting, we are forced to make big gestures. There is this relationship with the body and immersion in the landscape, as if the body were in the landscape. With the intermediate sizes, there is a confrontation between the body and the mind, how to manage to blend the two.

In another phase of your work, you revisited, in your own way, the paintings of masters, of painters who have marked the history of art. Can you explain what motivates you, what you want to create through this work?

Olivier Masmonteil - This work is part of the previous chapter, 'The pleasure of painting ‘. Each painter has their own language, and I wanted to understand the language of those I loved. I wanted to try to learn to speak ’Vermeer‘, to speak ’Poussin‘, to speak ’Titian‘, to speak “Courbet”, to speak ’Monet". The only way we can acquire this language as painters is by copying, to try to understand how these painters used colour, how they used their palette, how they worked their brushstrokes, how they created their paintings. After entering into this language through copying and beginning to understand it, I wanted to bring it into a language that was my own. I tried to see how I could make Vermeer's language my own, how I could bring it back to myself, starting from him.

Is there a form of dialogue, then? 

Olivier Masmonteil - Yes, there is a form of dialogue. When you copy a painter, you feel like you're talking to them. And there were some quite unsettling moments in the studio, with the certainty that the palette we had found was the palette Vermeer had used at that moment. Then, all of a sudden, you say to yourself, ‘He used that blue!’ And that blue, if I mix it with the pink he used just before, gives me the purple of another element in the painting. You rediscover how a particular colour was used by that painter; in a way, it's like a recipe.

Does colour play a decisive role?

Olivier Masmonteil - I think colour plays a role for all painters, but... it's not the same. And then there have been developments throughout the history of art. During the Renaissance, pigments were diversified and oil painting was invented. Venice was an important port where mineral and organic pigments arrived from all over the world. Colour exploded, making the Venetians ‘painters of colour’. At the same time, in northern Europe, Flemish painters invented oil painting. The Renaissance in painting was the meeting of north and south, the meeting of oil painting and colour.

At that time, colour was worked on palettes in a linear fashion. That is to say, one started with one shade, moved horizontally to another, and composed one's colour in this way. In the mid-19th century, a scientist named Chevreul, who was very interested in colour, established the theory of three primary colours that could be used to create all the other colours of the colour wheel. Painters began to change the way they painted and to break down colour in a circular fashion. The invention of the paint tube made it possible to paint outdoors. All of this completely changed the way colour was used. More recently, chemical pigments have appeared, which have once again changed the way colour is used. The manufacture of colours became industrialised, which brought down the price of paint, making new approaches possible in the 20th century.

You mention the price of paint for painters. Are you also sensitive to forms of elitism on the part of viewers, to the recent financialisation of art?

Olivier Masmonteil - Painting has always been associated with power. Since Lascaux, painting has had something magical about it. It certainly served to explain myths; the first painters were probably shamans. Later, paintings were used to represent battles, the power of kings and princes, and the power of the church, in the service of power. In the 17th century, the bourgeoisie began to take an interest in painting, which became an outward sign of wealth in their homes. In Flanders, as in Italy and France, painting, while becoming more democratic, remained the preserve of a certain bourgeois class who could commission paintings.

In the mid-20th century, avant-garde movements attempted to challenge bourgeois painting: artists such as Marcel Duchamp, the Supports/Surfaces group, etc. In the 1980s, painting began to be the subject of real financial speculation: people bought paintings in the hope of reselling them at a higher price. This made the fortune of auction houses, led to the rise of galleries, and fuelled the fantasy that a painting bought for €5,000 could later be worth several million.

So this led to the financialisation of the art world. When Jean-Michel Basquiat died in 1988, everyone wanted to own a Basquiat painting, which triggered a surge in prices. Since then, many ultra-wealthy people have sought to speculate on art. It is made up of unique pieces. In a capitalist market, a unique piece is extremely valuable when it can be reproduced infinitely. In a consumer society where clothes can be manufactured infinitely, objects can also be manufactured infinitely. Art creates unique objects.

In my opinion, we have reached the peak of this speculation with paintings worth several million. Some living painters are challenging the financial value placed on their own paintings, saying that because people focus so much on the money they represent, they no longer look at them. A parallel can be drawn with speculation on wine: people buy a bottle of Pétrus, but they don't drink it because it's too expensive. In the end, no one knows what Pétrus tastes like because no one wants to drink it and everyone keeps the bottle in their cellar. In the same way today, some paintings no longer leave their vaults.

Are artists currently taking action to combat this trend?

Olivier Masmonteil - Exactly. To combat this speculation. Last October, Art Basel Paris took place [FIAC - The International Contemporary Art Fair, which had been held every year since 1974 in October in Paris, ended in 2022 and was taken over by the Swiss group MCH, owner of the Art Basel fair, a ‘brand’ - Editor's note]; it is the global contemporary art market. I went to visit it: most of the stands had paintings worth several million euros. Clearly, the purpose of this fair is not to admire the beauty of the paintings, but to find out how much they are worth and whether buying a particular work of art is a good investment. 

In an attempt to break out of this system, there are more and more initiatives by painters. One example is the use of multiples: lithography, engraving and all printmaking techniques allow several copies of a work to be made, which brings down its price. In addition, some artists refuse to sell their works above a certain price. The difficulty lies in not being taken over by the market. As far as I'm concerned, if I sell a work for €5,000 tomorrow, I try to make sure that the person is actually buying it for its artistic value, because they like the painting and are not going to resell it for much more in six months' time. In a way, we choose the people we sell our paintings to.

What role do galleries play?

Olivier Masmonteil - Some gallery owners exhibit a successful artist and ask them to always do the same thing. Or the gallery owner says to themselves, ‘I'm exhibiting this artist and I'm going to get a very big collector to buy their work, which will increase its price’. Very few gallery owners say, "What I like is this artist's approach, and I'm going to support them for as long as possible to see how far they can take this journey, this approach ."

I work very little with galleries to avoid these pitfalls. The rare gallery I do work with is the Antoine Dupin Gallery: I like it very much because what interests them is seeing how I develop my work. To this end, it tries to promote and, of course, sell my work, but at a price that we both agree is fair, without trying to inflate it to excessively high levels. This would deprive a number of people of the opportunity to purchase a work and would also be at odds with my desire to maintain a certain degree of sobriety. I am sensitive to arguments in favour of ending consumer society. I don't need to sell at high prices because I don't want a big car. I don't want to sell something that I can't afford to buy myself. I don't want to spend money unnecessarily. My work as a painter is enough for me, and the money I earn is perfectly sufficient for me to live a very happy life.

Do you place a lot of importance on the collective?

Olivier Masmonteil - The profession of painter is often seen as something very solitary. This has not always been the case in the history of art. Until the mid-19th century, painters worked in studios. There were lots of people around them, people who ground the pigments, people who prepared the backgrounds and the canvas frames. It was inevitably a collective endeavour.

The studios communicated with each other. Some apprentices moved from one studio to another. More recently, artists have worked in a slightly more solitary manner, but they still enjoyed getting together. In the Impressionist movement, Renoir and Monet, for example, exchanged ideas and worked together a lot. We can see their two paintings entitled La Grenouillère [a guinguette on the island of La Grenouillère on the bends of the Seine downstream from Paris, editor's note]: they painted side by side, comparing their approaches to the same subject.

Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and others would gather around the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, surrounded by poets, to work together, frequent the same cafés, exchange ideas, discuss and debate painting. This spirit lives on. When I went to work in Germany, I saw that this collective spirit was very much alive. I tried to import it to France. Today, once again, many artists are coming together to work together.

Do you also have an educational approach?

Olivier Masmonteil - I enjoyed doing that for about ten years, but today I prefer to devote myself much more to my work. There was a time when I tried to do a lot of teaching because I met many artists who came to discuss painting with me and I realised that they had no knowledge of art history, many gaps in their technique, and many did not really know how to draw. Instead of trying to advise them, I decided to make videos to give them some ideas for how to work. I worked with Lefranc-Bourgeois and we worked on different aspects: using colour, oil painting, mediums, stretching canvas, drawing better. With all these short videos, I wanted to convey that painting is a real profession, and that it is a profession that can be learned. For me, it took 10 years: 5 years of study with a teacher of classical painting and drawing, then 5 years at art school trying to understand contemporary painting and question it. So I tackled chapter 1, which we talked about: perfecting my artistic education, enriching it with reading, reading about art history, reading philosophy, everything that constitutes the background you need to have when you want to paint.

Today, many people go out and buy paint and a canvas and do whatever they want on it. It's very exhilarating to do whatever you want on a canvas. It's a lot of fun. Like a child playing with paint. In nursery school, children are given paint. They have fun, they do all sorts of things. It's very exhilarating. But when you want to become a professional painter, you have to know how to question, how to develop your own language. To develop your own language, you have to acquire that of others. It takes practice and time.

I just read a short book of interviews between Charles Juliet and Fabienne Verdier. She describes her apprenticeship in calligraphy. She went to Asia for ten years to meet a master calligrapher. She slept in front of his door for three months so that he would agree to teach her. He told her it would take ten years. When he finally agreed, she rejoiced, ‘That's it, I'll be able to draw.’ But her master made her sit and contemplate a landscape for a year. He told her, ‘Before you learn to represent things, you must learn to look.’ That's exactly what I experienced when I learned to draw. Learning to draw is learning to look. And that takes a long time.

... and involves new experiences, constantly? Your recent return to outdoor painting?

Olivier Masmonteil - When I was at art school, I was exposed to the outdoors, which I really enjoyed. As I said, I worked outdoors a lot when I was 20-25, when I had my studio in Limousin. Three or four years ago, I revisited that experience. I really wanted to get out of the studio and reconnect with the landscape. And I rediscovered this totally different way of painting when you're outdoors. That is to say, you can't necessarily paint what you see, because what you see is constantly changing. The light changes, the clouds change. You have to paint something else. And that's where, little by little, I became aware of this necessity: trying to paint the invisible aspects of the landscape. When I went back to the studio, I had to remain completely immersed in this feeling in order to be able to paint, especially memories, the memory of all those landscapes that had shaped me. Once or twice a year, I now do outdoor sessions where I go away for three weeks to a month to work on a landscape. I can see it in the morning, in the evening, during the day, when it rains, when the weather is fine. And all this variety of light, atmosphere and landscape feeds into the work a little more.

In June 2025, I had the chance to have an exciting experience. I was able to paint the Water Lily Pond. I was able to go there after the garden closed. I was all alone on the pond, trying to confront this subject that Monet had created and painted for 20 years. I love these paintings very much. I tried to understand what he was painting and why he had built this pond and why he was able to paint it for years until his death.

Interview by Isabelle Favre, October 2025

 PORTFOLIO

Sans-titre, 2024. Huile sur toile,180x160cm

Sans-titre, 2024. Huile sur toile,180x160cm

Souvenir de paysage, 2025. Huile sur toile, 110-x-130-cm

Série "Paysages effacés"

Voyages effacés, 2021. Huile-sur-toile, 55x46cm

Voyages effacés, 2021. Huile-sur-toile, 162x130-cm

Madagascar, souvenirs effacés, 2019. Huile-sur-toile,120x100cm

Madagascar, souvenirs effacés, 2019. Huile sur toile,100x120cm

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