For the last five years, Leon Morrocco has worked extensively in the South of France, based in and around Nice, where he keeps a small apartment overlooking the old harbour. During that period, what began as a familiar engagement with the fishing harbours, boats and shoreline villages of the Mediterranean coast gradually shifted inland, towards the mountains that rise abruptly behind the sea.
The Alpes-Maritimes dominate the inland landscape. Their parched limestone escarpments form a dramatic counterpoint to the intense blues of sea and sky, and the dense greens of trees and foliage. Drawing became the essential means of navigating this unfamiliar terrain. It allowed Morrocco to grapple with the visual challenges posed by the landscape: its monumentality, its abrupt shifts in scale, and its jagged physical presence. His annotated drawings of the mountains, retaining the immediacy and emotional charge of those first encounters, would form the backdrop to many paintings later developed in the studio, and a foil to the numerous sketches of villages, olive trees, market squares and terraces, around which the mountains acted as a unifying framework.
Table & Chair against the Mountainside, oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm
