DE ALVIS Michel - Oil on canvas "Les moulins de Montmartre" 54x73cm (20P) - 1966

This original oil on canvas by Michel De Alvis, titled Les moulins de Montmartre, offers a particularly expressive and structured vision of one of the most iconic landscapes of Paris.

The artist depicts the famous windmills of Montmartre within a dense tangle of façades, rooftops and buildings. Rather than favouring a picturesque or anecdotal representation of the Butte, Michel De Alvis builds his composition around volumes and lines. The buildings appear to interlock with one another, while the vertical silhouettes of the windmills dominate the whole and stand out against a vast blue sky.

Matter is one of the essential elements of this painting. Thick, worked in relief and marked by strongly defined outlines, it gives the architecture an almost sculptural presence. The palette combines ochres, browns, blacks and deep greens with blue-grey tones and a few light surfaces that bring light and breathing space to the composition.

This powerful treatment of matter and the way the forms are outlined by dark lines may, in certain respects, recall the painting of Bernard Buffet, particularly in the graphic construction of the architecture and the tension created by the lines. The work can also be compared to the world of Claude Venard, for its taste for strongly structured urban compositions, its impasto and its generous painterly texture giving the buildings real density.

Michel De Alvis nonetheless retains a personal idiom: Montmartre is here described less as a tourist backdrop than as a monumental, almost mechanical urban landscape, where windmills, houses and timber frames form an accumulation of shapes and textures. The 20P format (54 × 73 cm) reinforces the breadth of this horizontal composition and allows the eye to travel across the many details of the canvas.

A characterful work devoted to Montmartre and its windmills, combining Parisian landscape, architecture and expressive painterly matter.