Christophe Stibio's current solo exhibition, Lakes Mungo-Arumpo Series 4, is showing at Flinders Lane Gallery from July 27 to August 14, 2010.

Having undertaken fine art training under the tutelage of Chinese master painters, French born artist Christophe Stibio's resulting practice revolves around a work ethic combining patience, control and an astute awareness of time. Exploring ideas of becoming and emergence, Christophe's representations of the desert regions of southern New South Wales capture the experience of an optical mirage. Shifting masses of hills and dust merge, shadow and light undulate and the whole field of space and time collide in an infinite moment.

My paintings are the arena where I chase, tear, pull apart, manipulate, destroy, lose, hide, dissolve, disappear, die. Looking for and finding it time and again.

As a process calligraphy opens a way to understand history and civilization, since one doesn't hold a brush with the hand but with the mind. More than anywhere else, China was the place where I learned the dualistic process of following rules and then knowing how to let go of them. This is where I put into practice the possibility of exploring and expressing the currents of my thoughts and emotions.

As a new Australian citizen, preoccupied with the desert landscape, I cannot help but think about Philip Jones in his last book Ochre and Rust, who says as he gazes at a land that stretches out in front of him until Lake Torrens 'the profound calm of this scene seems to deny history, the fabric torn since the first encounters...' From one battle to another, my paintings witness that ambiguity. It 'seems', therefore nothing is less sure. It seems calm but at what cost, and for whom? Whose story is it? Whose will it be? In that line, I want my landscapes to produce something disharmonious but stable, fantastic and frightening as well as infinite. I also want them to be delicate and intimate.

Christophe Stibio