PATRICK LOSTE

Patrick Loste never illustrates the world of horses. He does not paint his own animals (is the word still accurate?), which live in semi-liberty in his Pyrenean mountain land. He does not make pictures. He paints unknown horsemen, tiny passers-by of immensity. On the fly, he paints Saints Georges who confront, riders who hunt, falconers who look at the sky. He never stops painting fabulous centaurs, his impossible doubles. So many creative pretexts, so many ways for the painted horse to finally inhabit the innumerable earth. After painting, riding the beast puts him back in the saddle ….  At the centre of his art, the horse centres the man.

Patick Loste paints the horse-man entity, the one that creates expanse through its stride, that merges man with the sources of his deepest and most secret animality, that embodies the deepest instinct of life, that eroticizes the intimate relationship between the humanized beast and the animalized rider who rides it, and finally the one that abolishes, for a time, the unthinkable distance that separates man from his nature.]                                                              Extract from Christian Noorbergen’s text