New York (AFP)

For more than 40 years, Gus Van Sant has always had a parallel interest in painting, one of his youthful passions.

Nine of the most recent paintings by the director of "Elephant", "My Own Private Idaho" or "Good Will Hunting" are, since a few days and until November 1, visible at the Vito Schnabel Gallery, in the district of Greenwich Village - his first solo show in New York.

These watercolors on linen over 2 meters high are almost all without title, with for "main character" the sketch of a naked man, who seems to float in the middle of a dreamlike landscape made of waves of cars, colors which intertwine, with sometimes in the distance a recognizable landmark of Los Angeles, the Griffith Observatory.

For this first solo exhibition in New York, Gus Van Sant, who has been living in Los Angeles since the late '70s, was inspired by many "years of living not far from Hollywood Boulevard," he said in an email to AFP.

There is the desire to "transmit all the emotions and transgressive activities that take place there," added the 67-year-old filmmaker, whose work has always focused on various forms of marginality. "There are also moments of reflection, moments of despair, curiosity, and sometimes madness".

For him who won the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 2003 for "Elephant" and had great success with "Good Will Hunting" or "Harvey Milk", painting and making films are "essentially distinct" activities, even if there are sometimes links.

"The realization is turned to history, with a dramatic tension, while the painting has a visual tension that is related to the composition, the context," he says.

Although this is his first solo exhibition in New York, Gus Van Sant's taste for painting and multidisciplinarity is well known: in 2016, the Cinémathèque française devoted a retrospective to him, showing as much his work as a painter of photographer.

And in 2011, he organized with the actor James Franco an exhibition in Los Angeles, showing their paintings to both.

"Most" of the nine paintings exhibited in New York are already sold, said Cy Schnabel, brother of the gallery owner Vito Schnabel, without specifying for how much or by whom.

© 2019 AFP