Facade at Dawn is an original oil painting on Japanese shikishi board by French artist Sébastien Coueffic, part of his Architecture series for Art San Gallery. This compact composition isolates the top of a residential building—arched windows, decorative ironwork, and a steep roof—bathed in coral, rose, and orange tones beneath a tranquil blue sky. A crisp triangle of light carves across the wall, capturing the fleeting precision of morning sun.
Coueffic’s handling of color and structure recalls the decorative restraint of the Nabis painters, particularly Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, who similarly translated light and place into flat, lyrical color fields. Like them, Coueffic softens architectural detail to focus on the emotional presence of space—prioritizing harmony, surface, and rhythm over linear description.
There is also a visual kinship with Precisionist painters like Ralston Crawford, in the clarity of the silhouette and the architectural isolation of the subject. The simplified forms and deliberate compositional framing suggest a dialogue with Color Field painting, where color relationships carry structural weight.
Painted in oil on a Japanese shikishi board, the piece invites close viewing. The shikishi format—rigid, gold-edged, and traditionally used for calligraphy—adds an intimate objecthood to the painting, reinforcing Coueffic’s focus on distilled form and poetic immediacy.
Facade at Dawn transforms a mundane urban fragment into a highly constructed visual moment—where the interplay of color, shadow, and architectural rhythm reflects Coueffic’s unique synthesis of European modernism and Japanese material sensibility.
Facade at Down – Oil on Shikishi by Sebastien Coueffic
Original one-of-a-kind artwork by Sebastien Coueffic.
Oil painting on a traditional Shikishi made in Kyoto - Japanese paper mounted on a cardoard with a golden border of metallic paper.
Size : 24cm x 27cm (9.4 x 10.6 inches)
Signed "Coueffic".
