Designing with In the Forest

This is a piece for a room with plain walls and low light. In a hallway or a study it reads almost like panelling, the verticals drawing the eye up and making a low ceiling feel taller. It sits well above a sideboard or a low console, hung so the bottom edge lands roughly at eye level, and it wants a wall in off-white, warm grey or deep green rather than a saturated colour. The smallest size suits a narrow passage or a pair hung side by side. The larger sizes carry a sofa wall alone and need nothing beside them. Lamp light warms the greens in the evening. Daylight keeps them cool and exact.

Read next to The Violet Wave and Birken am Moorgraben, the argument becomes easier to follow.

Lacombe Cuts a Forest Into Bands

The eye starts low, where the trunks are widest, and climbs. Each trunk is carved in alternating bands of black and sap green, so the forest reads as rhythm before it reads as trees. Between them the canopy closes in flat, unbroken greens. There is no depth to fall into, only a lattice of verticals that keeps pulling upward. The image is still, but the eye never quite settles. It moves from trunk to trunk the way you would walk between them.

Lacombe was the sculptor among the Nabis, and it shows. Where Bonnard and Vuillard dissolved the world into pattern and colour, he built it in blocks. He carved his woodcuts himself, and the carving shows in every edge, straight and deliberate. In the Forest sits at the meeting point of his two practices, the relief of sculpture and the flat decorative surface his circle pursued. It is a painting of trees that behaves like architecture.

A Nabi Forest, Flat and Deliberate

The Nabis worked in Paris in the 1890s under the influence of Gauguin and the Pont-Aven group, and they rejected the idea that a picture should open a window onto the world. A picture was a surface first. They flattened space, let colour carry mood rather than description, and borrowed openly from Japanese woodblock design. Lacombe took that program further than most by actually cutting wood. His prints share the era's taste for simplified nature, but their weight comes from structure rather than charm.

What holds attention here is the discipline of the reduction. A real forest is chaos. Lacombe gives it order without prettiness, and the result feels closer to a gate or a screen than a landscape. That severity is why it survives daily life. It does not compete with a room or fade into it. Each morning the bands are exactly where they were, and the eye still climbs them.

Carved Wood, Alternating Bands

The Trunk Bands

At arm's length the trunks break into discrete strips of black and green, cut cleanly with no gradation between them. The alternation does the modelling. A band of black beside a band of green is all the shading Lacombe allows, and the trunks still read as round. It is the oldest trick in relief carving, applied to a tree, and it works every time you look.

The Canopy Field

Above the trunks the surface closes into flat greens with almost no internal drawing. The contrast is the point. Busy verticals below, silence above, and the eye reads the canopy as weight pressing down on the forest floor. Lacombe resists adding leaves or detail. The emptiness is what makes the trunks feel tall, and it keeps the whole image calm at a distance.

Edge and Cut

Because Lacombe carved the block himself, the edges carry the gesture of the knife. Lines stop where a cut stops. Shapes meet with slight irregularities that a drawn outline would never show. Look closely and the image reveals itself as something physical, made by hand in wood. That trace of labour is part of what the edition preserves at every size.