Nicolas Auvray Gallery is pleased to present La Couleur Décomplexée, a dual exhibition of the uninhibited and unrestrained worlds of Paul Hughes and Gérard Stricher. On view from September 18 through October 26, 2025, the exhibition unites two European masters of color in a spirited dialogue between landscape, memory, and gesture.

Paul Hughes presents works from his My Giverny series, developed over the last eighteen months with an emphasis on new 2025 paintings. Inspired by Claude Monet’s gardens yet purposefully imagined from a distance, Hughes has chosen never to visit Giverny itself. Instead, he reconstructs its mythic aura through the darker, shifting light of the Irish landscape and through what he describes as “my own amazing imaginary world of Giverny… what I have sought to paint are not reproductions of what is there but rather to create individual dreamscapes.”

Hughes often paints with both hands at once, as if grappling directly with light and color at the surface of the canvas. Music is an essential guide in his creative process. wonders how it feels and what it might look like, creating a body of work that transforms memory and imagination into luminous painterly experience. In contrast, Gérard Stricher works from the very soil of Giverny’s neighboring Vexin landscape, but his paintings resist direct homage. His canvases erupt with sweeping strokes, thick impasto, and raw physical energy, transforming the pastoral into an arena of pure chromatic force. Stricher’s palette—dominated by incandescent primaries—carries affinities with the CoBrA movement’s expressive freedom while remaining deeply personal, born of an intense, bodily dialogue with paint. Alongside monumental works, he debuts a new series of intimate canvases created this summer in Provence, where gesture condenses into concentrated bursts of color and texture.

Together, Hughes and Stricher offer two distinct yet complementary visions of abstraction rooted in place but freed by imagination. Their works share a conviction in painting as a physical and transformative act, affirming the medium’s power to transcend geography and history in pursuit of luminous, dreamlike worlds.