Sam Choisy is a personal friend and an artist The Luminous Landscape profiled last year. Sam is a French transplant to Canada who carries a very palpably French sensibility in his abstract, romantic, vibrantly contemporary art.

His work is entirely singular and based on a unique and intimate method. Sam teaches his approach and philosophy, a hands-on, very immersive photographic creation style that invites the participant to embrace seeing, moving, and making in new ways.

His light paintings generate the effect of a blend of double exposure, collage, three-dimensional disorienting sculpture that point towards deeply poetic and gestural body-based images. They speak to the landscape in a post landscape art way. This new body of work takes his process into spheres that truly advance on his past explorations.

There is dance, anguish, and darkness in this work, but there is also something like a gate to another realm where time is made liminal, and these haunting environments seem very sensual and magical yet also designed and crisp. These latest images are simultaneously portrait like and visually tight vignettes that move from high focus detailing to wild admixtures of very tactile environment and sticky membranes of 2d like additions. There is geometry, fractal reflections and a gesture to our relationship to time. They remind me of molecular chemistry or some quantum fluctuations of light and wave, like the stuff within mood rings come to life and magnified. Like the shimmering light we cannot find in nature besides when we squint our eyes, they evoke the psychedelic experience beyond the pastiche or cleché.

I love this work, and I really appreciate Sam’s full dedication to his Art, which is the kind of process-rich work that has to be practiced with total confidence embracing failure and curiosity that inspires us all to take chances and bleed a bit for our own vision.

COVID culture’s absurdity of suffering, parenthood, North American life, inner and outer landscapes and deep sacrifice all hover around this new body of images. I say this with reverence.

I asked Sam if he had any words to accompany his latest work, and he had this to say:

“A little bit, in french 🙂
I’m trying to understand my interest for landscapes in my work and trying to define the way I represent it/ use it, what I put into it, its meaning to me…
It’s interesting because it bridges my past as a guy who grew up on a farm and who has been ambivalent for a while about staying there and perpetuating the family’s tradition and my future as an artist who’d like to make images in the land and of the land in the most sustainable possible way. And while I’m on this bridge, everything is paradoxical and contradictory (I work with digital photography, indoors, with artificial lighting most of the time, I’m an urban guy).”

Sam’s work is the kind that I can see hung anywhere as an enhancement to a space’s interior while enhancing one’s personal interior as well. I recommend investing in him.

For inquiries and more of Sam’s work: http://www.samuelchoisy.com/about

Josh Reichmann

December 2020