One could look at Montegrande’s painting and say that there are two sides to his artistic character. On the one hand, he’s a pretty straightforward romantic-impressionist painter of eloquent and oftentimes iridescent land-, sea-, and cloudscapes that are indelibly an extension of the artist’s own inscape. And on the other hand, he can be a conjurer of what the British painter Francis Bacon calls “real painting” where the artist enacts “a mysterious and continuous struggle with chance.” In the case of Montegrande, the struggle is captivatingly depicted by a palette of brilliant and lurid new tones, configured in an array of captivating strokes, shapes, density, as well as texturing techniques.
The viewers of Montegrande could certainly find in the ethos of his art a resonance of Bacon’s depiction of “real painting” as “pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the bits down.” They could instinctively conclude that he, especially as an abstract expressionist painter, risks everything on emotion and inspiration. But they could choose to take a closer look, and in so doing, grow to realize that the “risks” of spontaneous and free-ranging expressions are skillfully re-collected (in quite a Wordsworthian sense) by firstly, a very keen intelligence and art instinct, and secondly, Taste (to use a term that just wouldn’t fit into a conceptual straightjacket).