Saltwater Skies

Saltwater Skies

Travel Diary, 23/11/23, Tambaron Island, Philippines
The sun changes everything when you’re snorkelling. The purples, the greens,
the yellows become dazzling, glorious.

This exhibition is an invitation to take a closer look at what lies beneath the surface of the ocean.
I have been painting pristine jungle landscapes for the past 15 years, and needed to challenge
myself with a change of scenery. I spent three months last winter backpacking around the South
China Sea (from the Philippines to Cambodia, through Vietnam), with my tent, machete, and a few
art supplies in my bag.
I got my diving license, and it opened up the door to a new world and new landscapes : an
underwater realm of corals, turquoise waters, fishes, turtles and anemones.
Using a diving sketchbook with plastic pages and coloring pencils, I did some drawing underwater
whille snorkelling, but mostly took thousands of photographs and videos to create a personnal
database for this series of paintings.

Travel Diary, 03/02/24, Koh Ta Kiev, Cambodia
I swam for 20mins towards the open sea, far from the beach, to discover some
wonderful corals and an incredible field of anemones! A few clown-fishes (big
ones, maroon with a white dorsal line) take shelter in their tentacles.

Back to the studio, I usually modify my pictures quite a lot before painting them, changing the light,
the colors, the composition, but I found out that the photographs I took underwater already had that
uncanny aspect that i’m longing for in my work. A sense of eerie, blurred and bluish backgrounds,
helped me create a strong sense of depth in this series of landscapes. A challenging oil painting
series nontheless, due to the new color palet I had to work with and the infinite level of details that
the coral structures have, which I had to simplify one way or the other. I wanted to render the
density of the water and its surreal colors at the same time.

This exhibition also features a series of oil pastel drawings: a great balance between the underwater
colouring pencils drawings I did on-site and my oil painting practice in the studio. It allowed me a
more spontaneous approch to render the different colours and textures of this immersed world,
playing with contrasts of hues and saturations, and looking for interesting composition in the
chaotic-looking rocks and corals one can find on a reef.

Travel Diary, 17/11/23, Puerto Galera, Philippines
First swim in the middle of the corals, nearly completely bleached. I do see,
among the grey skelettons, a few blue-green sea-cucumbers, the only hint of life
in this bay, or should I say cemetery

During my travels, I witnessed firsthand the devastation of the natural landscaped and its
inhabitants (our species included) caused by human society, from the mines of the Cordillera in
Bolivia to the burnt forests of Borneo and even though I might not be a model ecological citizen, I
am very concerned by those questions. In the last 30 years, we lost 50% of the world’s coral.

“Do we need trees ? Do we need forests ? Do we need coral reefs ? Or can we just live in the ashes
of all of that ?” Chasing Coral, 2017 documentary

My work is based on real-life experiences, but I am not a documentary painter. I do feel a duty
though to show through my work the beauty and wonders of what’s left of the virginial landscapes,
to share it with the public.
I realized that very few painters tackled this subject of underwater landscapes: there is no collective
imagery of artistic visions of seascapes. Hopefully these new series can begin to change that. We
are in dire need of a new narrative, one that focus on the poetry of the wild world.

A world where the sky is made of saltwater.

Bruno Gadenne, 2024