One evening at twilight in the late 1970s Claude Lazar was leaving his studio and experienced a moment of the sublime. Night was falling fast and the sky was already quite dark from a storm that threatened. Yet, as he looked out, Lazar saw a strong light flooding the top floors of an adjacent building where the setting sun had managed to penetrate. That pervasiveness and persistence of light in the face of impending dark changed everything for the artist.

It makes perfect sense then that Lazar, as he is called by his wife, Margot, has a singular, expansive goal for his painting. He wants the viewer, after looking at his work, "to feel surrounded by art." He explains it via Duchamp. "Marcel Duchamp said that everything is art. I think everything can be a subject for art, which is to say that you can paint whatever you want and it still can be art. Compared to the old academy way of thinking, this provides a total freedom about what you have to express. So I found around me the subjects of my paintings. A window, a corridor, a staircase, a street—everything became my models."

But one could just as easily explain it via the light. Lazar purposely omits people, signage, and furniture from the architectural spaces he paints so that the viewer might just concentrate on the light. It is only by light that one can see, and thus Lazar makes light the main personage of his paintings.

In this new body of work, Lazar returns to his adopted hometown of Paris, including some landscapes which seem set on the edges of the city, where the urban dissolves into rural. Lazar also sets his sights further afield to look at the distinctive structures of New York, with its water towers, fire escapes, and metal roll gates. The place is different, and therefore so is the quality of light. But with Lazar, always constant in his understanding and perception of the world around him, we recognize his works' distinct mood and structure, which remain profound.

This exhibition celebrates the individual work of Claude Lazar and Margot Lazar. But it also celebrates their artistic life together. As Claude describes, "Sharing a life with someone doesn't mean fitting into the same mold; each one has to keep his or her personality. We are similar in certain points but different in others. We are both figurative painters and we like the nice, finished paintings. But I work on dark, cold, and empty spaces expressing nostalgia and loneliness; Margot paints people with hot and flaming colors, and her subjects are positive and optimistic. In the 1980s we worked in the same studio, and from time to time we would stop working and look at what we each were doing. With a glass of wine and a cigarette in hand, we would discuss our research difficulties or other projects. Now we have separate studios in the same building and once in a while we visit each other with a glass of wine in hand—but no more smoking! The discussions are still so passionate. It has been a long collaboration and a beautiful story."