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Phlippe Halaburda Imaginary Mindscapes Featured at The Lionheart Gallery New Exhibition opens on July 8, 2016 through September 1, 2016 June 3, 2016, Pound Ridge, New York – French artist Philippe Halaburda hails from Aix-en-Provence, and the playful vibrant colors in his work echo the bright primary hues and sunlight of this region. For the past few months he has been making art in New York City, which he credits with lending more minimalism and deeper tones to his recent palette. His art can be found in collections, homes, and offices throughout Europe, North America, Canada, and Australia. Although abstract, Halaburda’s paintings explore the universal themes of love, personal crisis, beauty, and death, playing out in sprawling and imaginary urban maps and landscapes. The artist sees his canvases as springboards for building mental architecture. Exploring interactions between shapes and lines, he forms “art topographies” that explore social tensions and relationships instead of addresses and landmarks. Using acrylic paints, Halaburda makes patterns that look like cities seen from high above—in fact, his process is to paint on canvasses that lie flat on the floor. The geographies he creates are intricate and meticulous, yet emotionally charged, and become maps of passions, ideas, and dreams. The artist professes a spontaneity and expressiveness that is evident in the marks he makes: lines that might be partial letters or numbers, large washes of paint, smaller shapes spiraling out that seem like fragments of earth or machinery. To achieve this range in his work, Halaburda has experimented with unusual studio tools, including replacing paintbrushes with rubber spatulas to create clean shapes and smooth, even applications of pigment. “My style is a graphic game of lines, strokes, colors, repetitions…it oscillates between binary opposites: imagination and observation, lucidity and frenzy,” writes Halaburda. “It blurs the boundaries between painting, drawing, and writing, while preserving a high degree of love for the colors.” And the colors jubilantly shine in each composition, especially given Halaburda’s skillful manipulation of acrylic paint to make it appear translucent one moment, rich and opaque the next. As Lionheart Gallery Director Susan Grissom notes, “Philippe’s paintings are like imaginative aerial views that have a strong sense of place...he creates wonderful new worlds on a monumental scale.”