A Swiss Modernist Painter

Landscape with Green Fir Tree, 1960, watercolor on paper, 41 x 51.5 cm (R.), 9.2 x 9.5 cm (upper R.)

Landscape with Green Fir Tree, 1960

The painting depicts an expansive hilly landscape in soft green and yellow hues. In the foreground, a blooming meadow stretches out, dotted with yellow flowers and interspersed with scattered rock formations. A striking, slender green fir tree stands on the right, forming a vertical focal point amidst the soft, curved forms of the surroundings. The middle and background areas consist of small clusters of trees, fields, and meadows, whose multifaceted green tones lend the painting a calm yet rhythmic structure. The atmosphere appears clear and peaceful, conveyed by a harmonious, slightly stylized interpretation of nature.
The work belongs to a phase in which Evard – one of the early pioneers of Swiss Concrete Art – more frequently combined his abstract impulses with figurative motifs. While he was among the pioneers of non-representational art in the 1920s, this later landscape painting demonstrates his turn towards a moderate, structurally composed formal language. The clear composition, the planar color treatment, and the rhythmic order of natural forms reflect his lifelong engagement with the interplay between abstraction and figuration.