Invisible Presences
Nicholas Manning
Invisible Presences brings together paintings, pastels, and prints populated by enigmatic figures and landscapes poised at the threshold of reality.
A metaphysical and playful universe, where strangeness coexists with gentleness, and where images seem inhabited by discreet, unseen forces.
Artist Presentation – Nicholas Manning
Born near Sydney, Nicholas Manning first studied literature, art history, and painting in Brisbane on Australia’s east coast. He moved to Paris at the age of 19 to pursue higher education at the École normale supérieure (Ulm) and the Sorbonne, completing a doctorate in Strasbourg. He later lived in London and Rome before settling in Lyon in 2020. A lecturer and researcher at Université Grenoble Alpes, he develops his artistic practice primarily through oil painting, dry pastel, gouache, and linocut printmaking.
Informed by Symbolist, Fauvist, and Nabi traditions, his aesthetic draws on an imagination that is both metaphysical and playful. His fantastic landscapes, sometimes inhabited by otherworldly beings, are not reflections of this world but echoes of a vibrant beyond, where diffuse threats may linger.
His Artistic World
Informed by Symbolist, Fauvist, and Nabi traditions, his aesthetic draws on an imagination that is both metaphysical and playful. His fantastic landscapes, sometimes inhabited by otherworldly beings, are not reflections of this world but echoes of a vibrant beyond, where diffuse threats may linger.
Marked by the use of color in the work of Félix Vallotton, Marc Chagall, and Maurice Denis, he also explores the power of narrative painting capable of sketching multiple possible storylines. Through their recurring presence and the mysterious activities in which they engage, the small figures that appear in his works may recall the vignettes of Bruegel and the Flemish school. Closer to our own time, in contemporary painting, he draws equally from the atmospheres of metaphysical mystery found in the work of Inka Essenhigh, Hurvin Anderson, and Peter Doig, as well as from the feigned naïveté of Craigie Aitchison and Karine Rougier.
His work is inspired by various currents of spiritual representation in art—from pagan art to Orthodox icons and Greco-Latin frescoes—without adhering to any specific religious tradition. Influenced by the symbolism of Odilon Redon in France, Eugène Jansson in Sweden, and Sidney Nolan in Australia, he seeks to capture manifestations of an invisible world within our everyday material reality. The creatures, ghosts, or spirits hovering above these landscapes seem to occupy a liminal space, at the boundaries not only between dream and reality, but also between the world of the living and that of the dead.
The works of Nicholas Manning, artist-in-residence at L’Alcôve since 2025, are held in several private collections in Lyon, Paris, and the Mediterranean region.