Cédrix Crespel: Hold Back The Night
Press release

Opening Night: 3 October, 6-8pm

 

*San Diego CA – Madison Gallery is proud to announce, Hold Back the Night, the second solo exhibition by French artist Cédrix Crespel, with opening night October 3, 2026. This new body of work continues Crèspel’s poetic inquiry into connection, presence, and the intimate space between light and shadow.
 
Following his acclaimed U.S. debut with the gallery, Hold Back the Night expands his signature exploration of the human figure into the vastness of American nocturnal landscapes. Through luminous oil paintings rendered with striking sensitivity, Créspel offers a visual meditation on the interplay between body and environment, intimacy and distance, appearance and disappearance.
 
"In Paris, connection took form through proximity and the body,” says Créspel. “In America, it opens to the world.” Inspired by light filtered through bedrooms and long stretches of night sky, Créspel’s feminine figures emerge from the darkness, illuminated by what he calls “two lights of the same hour”—an interior glow and the distant light of wild landscapes. Like Georgia O’Keeffe, he finds resonance between body and earth, using tension as a binding force.
 
Yet these are not paintings of night. They are paintings of what night allows: stillness, memory, touch, longing. Within each composition, the personal and the universal converge—light flickering across skin or stone, the breath of time held just before fading. “I paint to hold, not to freeze,” Créspel writes. “To keep alive what drifts away.”
 
In Hold Back the Night, the night becomes an envelope for love, memory, and the seen and unseen, a space where presence is both revealed and abstracted—always returning to “Her,” the enduring presence within Créspel’s work.
 
*Exhibition Dates: 19 September – 31 October, 2026  
*Opening Reception: Saturday, October 3 | 6–8 PM  
*Location: Madison Gallery, 320 S Cedros Avenue, Ste. 200 Solana Beach, CA 92075
 
Press Contact:
mckenna@madisongalleries.com
www.madisongalleries.com
 
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