Didier Nolet’s landscape paintings, which blend his vision of childhood memories in France with places he has known in the United States, are on display in the galleries of the Chicago Botanic Garden beginning Saturday, Sept. 13. The Garden last hosted an exhibition of Nolet’s landscapes eight years ago.
“We are pleased to reintroduce our visitors to Didier Nolet, who first exhibited at the Chicago Botanic Garden in 1995,” said Susan Boothe, the Garden’s manager of gallery exhibits.
“Didier uses landscape as a way to capture a state of mind, giving his memories of a certain time and place a second look. Not beholden to painting exactly what is in front of him, he can evoke the past, yet arrange the remembered elements of light, atmosphere and form for maximum affect.”
Nolet describes his paintings as “the closest that I can come to abstraction, without abstraction. The landscapes are dreamlike and put together like stage sets. They are scenes in which motion is suspended.”
Born in a suburb of Paris, Nolet studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts from 1972 to 1979. As a painter in Paris, he fell in love with an American tourist in 1979. He followed her to Chicago, where they married.
“Childhood memories came flooding back my first winter in Chicago, and my landscapes became abstractions of these memories,” Nolet said. “Gradually, I began incorporating my American experience into my paintings.”
After living in Chicago for 15 years, the couple returned to France for a few months in 1995 and then moved to Arizona. In the fall of 2000, they again took up residence in Chicago.
Nolet’s work is represented in private, public and corporate collections throughout the world, including several in the Chicago area. Recently, he has been an instructor at Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills and The Suburban Fine Arts Center in Highland Park.
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