It is these fleeting patterns of glinting light on dark, rather than colour, that is most important to Katz. ‘Colours are irrelevant,’ he stated in a recent interview. ‘I can change the colours as long as I’ve got the light.’ The artist works fast, adopting a wet-on-wet technique, whereby the entire composition must be finished before the first layer has time to dry. This has led him to develop a quick, syncopated brushwork, which encapsulates his fleeting impression of the scene. The result is, as the director of Paris’s Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Éric de Chassey, describes it, ‘a kind of precipitate (in the chemical sense) of perception and sensation,’ where the artist does not so much seek to describe what he sees as to capture the power and feeling of water.

The works on view are the subject of a catalogue, published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, which also features a conversation between Katz and Luca Massimo Barbero, curator of the Cini exhibition.