Alain Churlaud: Material Memory and the Texture of Landscape

French painter Alain Churlaud, rooted in a family tradition of artistic expression, creates textured abstract works that preserve the memory of landscape through raw pigments, sand, and sawdust. His great-grandmother Marie Louise won first prize for porcelain painting in Geneva in the nineteenth century; his grandmother Lena painted oil landscapes, and his mother Jacqueline designed the family home after Monet's Giverny. Churlaud's practice balances intuitive freedom with structure, influenced by Georges Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, Nicolas de Staël, and Gerhard Richter. He prepares his own paints, often using genuine Cadmium Red Orange, and applies them with palette knives, rollers, and brushes to build tactile surfaces. Nature—water, mountains, forests—inspires his abstract compositions, while ambient and neo-classical music by Ian Hawgood, Wil Bolton, Enrico Coniglio, and Valgeir Sigurðsson shapes his creative rhythm. His 2026 painting 'The forest', created with acrylic, pure pigments, and genuine sawdust, was selected as cover artwork for an ambient music album, reflecting his interest in uniting visual art and sound. Churlaud has exhibited across France and in Rome, Venice, Barcelona, and Berlin, and his work is available through Singulart and Artsper. He collaborated with composer Enrico Coniglio on 'The Gentle Flow – From Peaks to Canals' and plans immersive exhibitions combining textured paintings with ambient soundscapes.