From Friday 20 February to Saturday 22 March 2025, Huberty & Breyne Gallery is pleased to announce its new exhibition devoted to Loustal, Maritimes

Loustal travels widely. He takes notes. He sketches landscapes. And human figures. Capturing the moment. Working directly from life, composing his images in sketch or photographic form. These images are stored in his notebooks – the hard drive of his creative process. Back in his studio, the artist then allows his experiences to gestate, slowly, over time. They feed into his artistic sensibilities, providing the raw material for his artworks. Artworks that surprise, that may evoke warmth or something chillier, but which always intrigue.

Composing in oils on canvas, Loustal frames and reframes his subject in the quest for a fragile equilibrium, constantly exploring new ways of working with light and the colour black. The results are simply astonishing. Whatever corners of the globe they represent, Loustal’s landscapes transport the viewer to other realms entirely. And his portraits of women are equally intriguing, simultaneously evoking pop culture and feelings of nostalgia in an approach that is nevertheless rigorously modern. We might go so far as to say that Loustal’s paintings offer an antidote to gloom and depression. This exhibition showcases a new series of paintings, while also providing the opportunity to sample a selection of black and white drawings the artist made for the book Ciné-roman, published this month by Zanpano – a celebration of the B movie aesthetic of the 1950s in which a humour-full Loustal delights in the connections between text and image.