Amid a contemporary painting landscape shaped by conceptual inquiry and aesthetic pluralism, Pierre Knop’s “Fireflies Under Fever Sky” emerges as a quietly radical gesture—reclaiming the emotive, symbolic, and visionary dimensions of landscape as a site of inner and outer transformation. Presented this spring at Pilar Corrias’s Conduit Street space, Knop’s first solo exhibition with the gallery affirms a singular voice of growing urgency and consequence. His vision is not only unmissable but profoundly relevant—a painter to be watched, studied, and collected.
Born in Nancy in 1982, raised in Germany, and a graduate of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Knop fuses the technical discipline of European painting with an intuitive, experimental sensibility. His works shimmer with surreal intensity and a quiet, metaphysical charge. Personal archives, fleeting memories, and fragmented art historical references converge into dreamlike vistas—at once intimate and disorienting, lush and foreboding. These are not escapist idylls, but threshold spaces where psychological interiority and ecological unease intertwine.
Drawing on figures such as Poussin, Friedrich, and Bonnard—while channeling the chromatic intensity of Abstract Expressionism and the afterglow of optical phenomena—Knop expands the vocabulary of landscape painting into a terrain of poetic instability. Scarlet skies burn above indigo forests; bioluminescent flora pulses with hallucinatory light. But it is not only palette that disorients—it is the emotional charge that emerges through layers of oil paint, pastel, ink, and pencil. In “Fireflies Under Fever Sky,” these materials converge in visual polyphony, producing a synesthetic field that oscillates between serenity and tension. Knop’s worlds are suspended on the edge—where stillness feels like suspense and something unspoken hovers just beyond reach.
When they appear, his figures are often spectral and peripheral—traces of human presence dwarfed by the immensity of nature. These silhouettes function as quiet witnesses, stand-ins for the viewer drawn into ambiguous terrains. The effect is not illustrative but existential. These are not landscapes to decode, but psychic states rendered with painterly force.
Opening Space for Reflection
Pierre Knop, 2024. Photo by Nadine Schwickhart. © Pierre Knop.
Pierre Knop, “Summer Closing,” 2025, Ink, gouache, oil pastel, and oil on canvas, 250 x 200 x 3.5 cm (98 3/8 x 78 3/4 x 1 3/8 in), courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. © Pierre Knop.
In a time marked by ecological unease and spiritual disconnection, Knop’s work opens a space of reflection—confronting contemporary alienation with reverie and restraint. “Fireflies Under Fever Sky” is more than a debut—it is a milestone. For collectors and institutions attuned to the deeper rhythms of painting today, Knop represents a rare convergence of conceptual depth, historical awareness, and technical mastery.
In the wake of this landmark presentation, Whitewall sat down with Knop to reflect on the exhibition’s themes, material experimentation, and emotional tensions—mapping the inner logic of a practice that continues to expand the possibilities of contemporary landscape.
WHITEWALL: Your landscapes draw from personal archives, fleeting memories, and art historical references. How do you navigate the tension between memory’s subjectivity and the formal tradition of European landscape painting when constructing these imagined environments?
PIERRE KNOP: I move unconsciously between memory, fiction, and art history. My paintings eventually appear like dreamscapes, fed by my personal impressions, collective imagination, and art historical references—particularly from European painting traditions. Playfulness and open-mindedness are dedicated tools that allow anything within the context of my landscapes. The result is a multi-media approach that embraces any kind of mistake or coincidence.
“I move unconsciously between memory, fiction, and art history,”
Pierre Knop
To my surprise, allowing my inner child to speak through these media has become the key to having an immersive painting experience. This mindset, combined with the technical element, creates a balance between control and non-control. It’s a bit of a va banque situation—or like juggling knives. On the one hand, you want control and to establish an operative pattern to create a painting. On the other hand, you want to switch off consciousness and move into a meditative, in-the-flow state of mind to create unexpected painting moments.
It’s like an interplay between two different parts of your brain, constantly moving from one state of perception to another. A good painting needs that tension and intensity—the tension between the fleeting, subjective nature of memory and the formal rigor of classical composition. My works should evoke both the familiar and the alien, like imagined memories of a past that never truly existed.
The Emotional Atmosphere and Visual Language of Pierre Knop’s Artworks
Pierre Knop, “Die Mutprobe,” 2025. Oil pastel and oil on canvas, 200 × 250 × 3.5 cm (78 3/4 × 98 3/8 × 1 3/8 in). Courtesy of the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, and the collection of Xenia Art Space, Limassol. © Pierre Knop.
WW: The exhibition title evokes both fragility and fever — fireflies as ephemeral light, fever as intensity or delirium. How did this title emerge, and how do you see these dualities shaping the emotional atmosphere of the works?
PK: The title reflects, in a way, my painting routine—an interplay between two dualities: control versus a kind of zen-anarchy. Dualities or oppositions are essential to my work; I needed this reflection, but on a poetic level, so the title emerged from the need to evoke a sense of tension between lightness and a feverish heat. Fireflies represent something beautiful, fleeting, almost magical, while fever suggests something intense, bodily, yet also mentally uncontrollable.
“Dualities or oppositions are essential to my work,”
Pierre Knop
I’m interested in these contrasts because they also appear in my paintings: on one hand, there are moments of calm, poetry, or humor; on the other, there’s often a sense of exaggeration, a latent, uncanny energy. The title aims to capture this emotional ambivalence, which viewers often describe when looking at my paintings.
WW: Your palette often veers toward the hallucinatory — scarlet skies, glowing flora, chromatic extremes. Are optical sensations like the after-image part of your visual language, and how do you think about perception or altered states in relation to landscape?
PK: I assume various reasons are coming together here. In a way, I’m drawn to these heightened color worlds or surreal images. It is a major goal to create new painterly moments through my experiments. My paintings don’t depict an external reality, but rather an inner one. The shivering after-image is a good metaphor for that: it’s fleeting, feverish, subjective, intense.
“My paintings don’t depict an external reality, but rather an inner one,”
Pierre Knop
In my landscapes, it’s often less about real places and more about states of perception and the duality of fiction and non-fiction. All materials are allowed to tip into the exaggerated, the artificial, or the dreamlike—like a moment suspended between waking and dreaming. Again, a duality. As a painter, I’m always interested in creating paintings I haven’t seen so far, or the kind of works I would like to see if I were visiting a museum. The current result—or answer—to that question is my solo exhibition at Pilar Corrias in London.
WW: Many of the landscapes in “Fireflies Under Fever Sky” seem to hold a quiet tension, as though something is about to unfold. How do you think about narrative, symbolism, or mood when composing these environments?
PK: To be honest, I don’t think about narration or symbolism at all. Or, to be more precise, I’ve decided not to reference these. It’s not the way I work when constructing levels of perception. I’m not interested in coding certain parts of my paintings, as it would counteract or intoxicate the relationship between painting and viewer. I don’t want the observer to decode my work on a didactic level. I want the viewer to have a non-verbal moment while looking at the work. This is much deeper than a ‘simple’ mood, and I’m convinced that a mood might even falsify the individual connection between viewer and painting. A mood can be too powerful a layer, suffocating perception. That said, I’m aware it is nearly impossible to be totally detached from any mood.
Process, Tradition, and Intention
Pierre Knop, “Tarasp,” 2025. Ink, crayon, oil pastel, and oil on canvas, 160 × 180 × 3.5 cm (63 × 70 7/8 × 1 3/8 in). Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. © Pierre Knop.
WW: You employ a rich mix of materials — impasto, ink washes, and fine linework — that generates a vivid sense of rhythm and texture. How do you approach this layering of techniques, and what role does materiality play in conveying emotional tone?
PK: The landscape is my playground and experimental platform for any material or colour experiments. Landscapes give me the potential to create a visual symphony of appearances through rhythm and texture. I’m eager to create paintings I haven’t seen before, so I specifically combine the materials I’m interested in: line and drawing, as they are sharp but fragile; powerful colour fields, as they have the quality to immerse; impasto with a sculptural quality, which reflects directly the link between reality and the flat illusion of painting. Every material brings so many opportunities and nourishes the practice of the multi-optional ‘System of Problems’. The moment you use your brush, crayon, or any tool to construct a mark/expression/tache (French → tachisme), a new situation on the canvas is generated. Therefore, you need to react and have an open question or problem that you are looking to solve.
“Landscapes give me the potential to create a visual symphony of appearances through rhythm and texture,”
Pierre Knop
WW: Your references span Poussin and Friedrich to Bonnard and Abstract Expressionism. In building on this lineage, how do you reflect or resist the pastoral ideal in light of contemporary anxieties around ecology, disconnection, and human presence in nature?
PK: I’m certainly interested in the tradition of the pastoral image, but more as a stage or projection. The academic decoding of mythological or Christian symbolism is not relevant to my work. I infiltrate the paintings solely as a painter, without the need to construct multiple layers of meaning. The environment in my paintings is exaggerated, shifted into something artificial or surreal. The idyll may tip into the uncanny or Wes Anderson-esque. Yet, even though I try to free my paintings from deeper meanings, our present inevitably influences the work: we long for nature, but at the same time we’ve alienated, destroyed, or aestheticized it. There is, it seems, a subtle duality here… the longing and the alienated. We want and need nature and landscapes—but do we actually still know them in their original sense?
WW: Small figures often appear in your landscapes — quiet, contemplative, almost peripheral. What draws you to include them, and what kind of relationship do you envision between these figures and the worlds they inhabit?
PK: The figures are not really important, even if they catch the viewer’s eye quickly. But I like how they operate in the illusionary space. They are a bit like stand-ins for the viewer or observers within the scene—some are dominating, but mostly they are integrated sensitively, displaying a certain vulnerability or wonder. I like placing them at the edge of things, almost swallowed by the landscape. The figures seem to be relics or traces of a civilization, shrunk into an individual. That is how I feel when I’m alone in the mountains or at the ocean. Your existence is reduced to the lowest level of significance. Nature, the environment, or the landscape does not care whether you are there or not. It’s not about telling a specific story, but about evoking a state of mind—of reflection, solitude, calm, and the silent vibration of life.
Pierre Knop, “Jungle Fever,” 2025. Ink, oil pastel, and oil on canvas, 180 × 200 × 3.5 cm (70 7/8 × 78 3/4 × 1 3/8 in). Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London. © Pierre Knop.
