Born in France during the emergence of the New School of Paris movement, Philippe Nault began to paint while a teenager. Figurative expression characterized most of his original cultural environment, and 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 helped him shape an intimate vision of “the world as the landscape of self”, and 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 rationales commonly associated in the identification of objects and life manifestations, to unveil a perception as unaltered as possible of their elemental nature. The naked sound of speech or laughter, or the pattern of an image, 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. His unusual life course became his body of work translated onto canvas, and quantified over a period of fifty years.
In the course of his career Nault has also produced large-scale projects in architectural private and public spaces, in France and in the USA. This eventually led him to work episodically as an art consultant for several American architectural firms. He is also an independent cultural interpreter for the Hawaiian Islands, and a long time practitioner of Chado, the Japanese Way of Tea.