Born in France during the emergence of the New School of Paris movement, Philippe Nault began to paint while a teenager. Figurative expression, which characterized most of his original cultural environment, initially defined his work before progressing later towards abstraction.

Rather than pursuing art as a career strategy, and driven by his interest for cosmology and spirituality, he eventually left his home country to explore other cultures and other mythologies. This search ultimately led him to shape an intimate vision of life and of the world, as “the landscape of self”. His painting became a way to contemplate, and to identify, with this concept.

After living successively in Paris, London and New Orleans, he ultimately settled in Hawaii. There he learnt from the ancestral ontology of the people of the Pacific, which favors sensory intelligence as an essential connector with the natural world. In a sense, it was a magnification of his predilection to elude the rational identification of objects and life manifestations, and unveil their elemental nature. The naked sound of speech or laughter, or the pattern of a form, then appear in their genuine and primal potentiality.

That was an instinctive way to explore the ordinary, where our perception of reality is only limited to the boundaries we define for ourselves, and to venture out of standardized cognition. It also summarizes Nault’s exploration of abstraction, and a life course that became his body of work quantified over a period of fifty years.

He is also an independent cultural interpreter for the Hawaiian Islands, and a long time practitioner of Chado, the Japanese Way of Tea.