LEFT BEHIND

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The title of the exhibition ‘Left Behind’ draws from multiple sources.

At its origin is a series of drawings that Saudubray made this past summer on the island of Naxos during a residency. These works marked a turning point for the artist, a moment of detachment from expectation. It allowed memories of figuration to surface, translating both emotional responses to the island and fleeting visual impressions, while remaining anchored in the formal language that he has developed in recent years. It was a liberating process: the A5 format allowed for an abundance of drawings, the freedom to erase, rework, and explore simultaneously — keeping alive the energy of inquiry.

The monastery setting, where he was staying, proved fertile ground for reconnecting with spontaneity and introspection. There was no goal to produce finished works for an exhibition, only the desire to let elements emerge without hierarchy. These drawings are like postcards in their format, or like the laminated icons found throughout Orthodox Greek homes.

A defining image from the island was the ‘Kouros of Apollonas’, a massive marble sculpture, abandoned mid-creation in the mountain. These unfinished figures, left behind because they were incomplete, resonate deeply with how Saudubray feels about painting. For a work to truly live, it must retain something unresolved, an absence, an opening. Julien is drawn to ruins and the stark simplicity of Cycladic sculptures: fragments of a civilization that birthed our own. These remnants, left exposed in nature rather than preserved behind glass, coexist with their environment. They are not “maintained,” but alive in their imperfection. These stones made the artist feel a kind of melancholia. He tried to channel that nostalgia into a driving force, to express in drawing a sense of apparition, suspended time, presence and absence.

The small-format paintings attempt to carry this same vitality and freedom. Each one is a moment, not part of a series: a head, a landscape, a flower — subjects that painters have always returned to. A return, perhaps, to simplicity, or at least to intuition without the urge to tame it. The big format canvases in the exhibition take inspiration from Cycladic vessels, basins and amphorae, austere, functional forms. Saudubray imagined them almost like still lifes: grouped in threes, arranged before a simple horizon line. For the first time in Saudubray’s larger works, this horizon introduced a sense of space, a minimal, undefined expanse. 

Saudubray’s residency terrace in Naxos looked out over the mountains to the right, and the sea to the left. The artist has spent hours absorbing the contrast between the density of the rock and the flatness of the sea’s edge. He has found himself somewhere between Caspar David Friedrich and Paul Cézanne.

The number three holds meaning here, and to conclude, Saudubray turns to a quote by Philip Guston: 

“When I see people making ‘abstract’ painting, I think it’s just a dialogue and a dialogue isn’t enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.” 

There is the painter, the painting, and a third presence. Duality alone doesn’t resolve anything; it is this third force that decides when the painting is finished. Guston also wrote something deeply resonant: that when a painter enters the studio, they must leave behind everything they know, their habits, cliches, even their knowledge. Eventually, if you're lucky, the painter disappears too, and only the painting remains.

“When you start working, everybody is in your studio — the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas — all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.”
— Philip Guston

Abandonment, then, is not a negative act. It’s a kind of rebirth, if we accept the need to let go of what comes easily, and begin again, again, again. Memories, too, fall behind us, but they can be reactivated as new pictorial forces. It’s this back-and-forth between letting go and rediscovery that matters here.