Pierre-Luc Poujol

Pierre-Luc Poujol was born in 1963 in Alès, in the Cévennes region of France.
In 1984, he began brilliant studies at the Bordeaux School of Applied Arts, graduating top of his class (first prize in drawing, first prize in perspective, first prize in sketching).
After dividing his time between France and the United States for several years, in 2018 he finally set up his studio in the South of France, near Montpellier.
Influenced by the peasant roots of his farmer grandfather and lulled by the spiritual environment of his pastor father, Pierre-Luc Poujol developed an early sensitivity to the world and nature around him.
Rewarded for his work and artistic commitment, he has won numerous prestigious awards. In particular, he won the international prize awarded by UNESCO for the bimillennium of the Nativity.
From March 23 to May 26, 2024, he presents “Arborescences”, his new monographic exhibition at the Musée Paul Valéry, featuring over 70 paintings and wood sculptures on the theme of trees and forests.
A committed artist, Pierre-Luc Poujol will become the first ambassador of the French NGO Coeur de Forêt in spring 2022, for which he will lend his voice and his paintbrushes to help preserve our biodiversity.

One only has to enter Pierre-Luc Poujol’s studio, nestled in the heart of a lush forest, to immediately understand his closeness to the plant world. This is a source of inspiration for the artist, which he transcribes in both his painting and sculpture.
Each of Pierre-Luc Poujol’s works is the concrete form of a boundless quest, where the boundaries between traditional techniques and avant-garde approaches become blurred. For him, creation becomes a constantly evolving field of exploration.
In addition to the projection and dripping techniques that give his painting its uniqueness, Pierre-Luc Poujol also uses his own organic and unconventional tools in his creations: tree branches, plant ashes, charcoal, allowing him a more intimate connection with his subject.
In his painting, the artist expresses a real desire to become one with his work.

“To paint is to accept to lose” is how Pierre-Luc Poujol defines his artistic commitment. For him, painting represents a risk, a path, an adventure, and translates into concrete form a free, intuitive expression that seeks not to achieve a goal, but to constantly explore new territories.

CURRICULUM VITAE

JOHAN VAN MULLEM

© Federico Miró

FEDERICO MIRÓ

“Joël Person was born in 1962 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast and he currently lives and works in Paris. After graduating from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, he devoted himself to portraiture before focusing drawing horses and erotic poses. He combines the classical purity of the line with a rare intensity of expression in his paintings and drawings. Person knows the traps of virtuosity. He looks for the moment where a nervous influx or spurt of life might change the careful framework of a figure.

Since his childhood he has been fascinated by horses whose physical structure he finds to be saturated with energy. He is equally captivated by the human figure. Eluding his own figurative technique, he looks for a breaking point in the static ritual of the pose. The moment a model rears up and flees elsewhere, he captures it with a contraction of the forehead, a twisting of the shoulder, a tilt of the face; Person maintains an illusion of realism. The intense life within his portraits is not born from the expressionist style, but rather from an anxious tension. It emerges from the artist’s confrontation between the “self” with others; a sudden surge towards freedom, a raw solitude which suddenly and briefly arises between the surface of the body, and the tension of the nervous system.”

— Philippe Garnier, Les Cahiers Dessinés #9

The artist has had several solo and group exhibitions in France and China, and many institutions have taken an interest in his universe. He has participated in residencies throughout the world that testify to his international career (China, several times, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ireland, Slovenia…). His work is a part of many private collections and is present in several important collections, notably within the collection at Hermès; his drawings and paintings are exhibited in their boutiques around the world (Paris, Milan, Istanbul, Tokyo, Shanghai, Dubai and Las Vegas…). Person has also taught drawing at the Prép’Art and Atelier Hourdé. His drawing Confinement has been acquired by the musée Jenisch in Vevey, Switzerland and his first book Et il n’est plus de place alors pour la peur will be published in September of 2022 by Cahiers Dessinés.

Artist’s portrait | © Xu Ke

LIFANG

Justa, 2019, Bois de chêne polychromé, 300 x 170 x 120 cm © Cedric Le Corf

CEDRIC LE CORF

Cedric Le Corf was born in 1985 in Bühl, near Baden-Baden (Germany), he lives and works in Brittany, in the Morbihan region. He graduated in 2009 with honours from the École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne in Lorient.

The anatomical landscapes inspired by Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty’s boards have resurfaced over time as an inspiration for Le Corf’s work. Little by little, a dismembered man is transformed into a landscape of a man. Humans, trees, and the earth all possess a kind of “skin” and with it, the ability to be flayed. Is it not true that a dissected body is merely a wide range of landscapes, full of mishaps, folds, and crevices? The slightest roughness in bone is reminiscent to the rocky landscapes of Patinir; the venous, arterial, or nervous network irrigates like rivers, plains, and estuaries; muscles, like the clay of Genesis, model gorges and mounds.

Using this metaphor, he uses plant roots as a landscape element to interlock bones, vertebrae, or joints made of porcelain. The root, in its etymological sense, is one element implanted inside another, much like the root of a tooth, a hair, or the dorsal root. It thus opposes the raw element of chaos to the mastery of creation, from roughness to polish, from decomposition to the inalterable, from the durability of art to the ephemeral man.

Imbued with the Rhineland and Armorican heritage, confronted with the pathos of Grünewald (Baldung Grien), the hanged men within “Des misères de la guerre” by Jacques Callot at “l’Ankou,” along with the macabre dances of Kernascléden, where the animate and the inanimate are mixed, to the horror of the mass graves of Sobibor, Le Corf tries, by attaching himself to a motif, to deafen the subject that the sculpture, the painting, or the engraving contains.

He has done several artist residencies, including the Dufraine Foundation in Chars, Académie des Beaux-Arts 2016-2018, the Spitzberg Expedition Residency 2017, Member of the Casa Velasquez in Madrid 2018-2019, and the Miro Foundation in Palma de Mallorca 2019.

He received the Georges Coulon Prize (sculpture) from the Institut de France, Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2017.

He has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in France, Germany, Spain and Belgium.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Awards

2020 – Prix Gravix, fondation Taylor, Paris

2017 – Prix Georges Coulon (sculpture) de l’Institut de France, Académie des Beaux Arts, Paris

Training

2009 –  DNSEP (mention), EESAB École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne site de Lorient

2007 – DNAP (félicitations), EESAB École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne site de Lorient

Residences

2019 – Fondation Miro à Palma de Majorque

2018-2019 – Membre de l’Académie de France à la Casa de Velazquez à Madrid

2017 – Résidence Spitzberg Expédition 2017, Association Marémotrice, Suisse

2016-2018 – Résidence à la Fondation Dufraine, Académie des Beaux Arts, Paris

Collection

Private collection (Lambert collection)

Solo swhow

2025 – Le sifflement du geai, Galerie Loo&Lou, Paris

2023 – Fôret Noire, Galerie Loo&Lou, Paris

2020 – Péninsules, Galerie Loo&Lou, Paris

2017  – Meisterhaft, Galerie Schmalfuss, Berlin

2016 – Os servatorio, Asklepios Medical School, Hamburg

2011 – Le voyage d’Issenheim, chapelle de Quelhuit, Île de Groix

2010 – L’homme paysage, travaux sur papier, Galerie-Galerie, Pont-Aven

          – Hommage à Jacques Fabien-Gauthier d’Agoty, Bühl / Baden

Collective shows (extracts)

2025 – Entailles, Association Pointe et Burin, Fondation Taylor

2024 – Collectif Körper, Galerie Taloté, Vannes

2022 – Nature // Natures, Galerie Loo&Lou, Paris

2021 – La Mare au diable, Nelly Stetenfeld et Cedric Le Corf, Chapelle St. Jaques, Clohart-Carnoët

         – Prétexte, du cheval à l’œuvre, Haras national du pin, Le Pin du Haras

2020 – Péninsules, Galerie Lou&Loo, Paris

          – Itinérance, Académie de France, Paris

          – VIVA VILLA, Collection Lampbert, Avignon

          – Itinérance, Madrid

          – ArtsLibris, ARCO, stand de la Casa de Velázquez, IFEMA, Madrid

         – Exposition et ateliers des artistes de l’Académie de France, Casa de Velázquez, Madrid

        – L’Âme du lieu, Château de Keroüartz, Lannilis

2018 – ESTAMPA, AFM 2018-2019, Madrid

          – Loups, y es-tu? Bestiaire et métamorphose, Château de Maisons, Maisons-Laffitte

2017 – Meisterhaft, Galerie Schmalfuss, Berlin

          – Spitzberg 2017, Galerie Graphem, Paris

2016 – Os servatorio, Asklepios Medical School, Hamburg

          – Biennale de l’estampe, Musée de Gravelines

2015 – Cabinet Da-End V, Galerie Da-End, Paris Nêtre, Plateforme, Paris

         – Lignes, Éclats d’art, Musée Bossuet, Meaux Gestern und Häuten, Villa Kolbe, Karlsruhe

2014 – XVII. Deutsche internationale Grafik-Triennale, Frechen

         – Le cabinet Da-end IV, Galerie Da-End, Paris

         – Kabinet d’estampes, Le Kabinet, Bruxelles

         – Gruppenausstellung, Kunsthalle Weissensee, Berlin

2013 – Mise à Nu, L’inlassable Galerie, Paris

2011 – Le voyage d’Issenheim, chapelle de Quelhuit, Île de Groix

2010 – L’homme paysage, travaux sur papier, Galerie-Galerie, Pont-Aven

          – Hommage à Jacques Fabien-Gauthier d’Agoty, Bühl / Baden

Edition

2020 – Péninsules – ArtPress octobre, l’Oeil septembre

2006 – Flux et reflux, cinq aquarelles originales – texte de Platon

2004 – L’homme et la coquille, gravures – texte de Paul Valery Editions

Ventre, 2025, charcoal on paper, 100 x 100 cm © Bastien Vittori

BASTIEN VITTORI

CURRICULUM VITAE

Training

2019 – 2021
National diploma in Fine Arts
Congratulations from the jury
École Européenne Supérieure d’Arts de Bretagne, Lorient

2018 – 2019
Preparatory class for art schools (CPES – CAAP)
Lycée Rosa Parks, Paris

Exhibitions and residences

Untitled 6, 2022, Acrylic, grass, clay, and mixed media on canvas, 160 x 130 cm © Olivier de Sagazan

OLIVIER DE SAGAZAN

“For those unfamiliar with Olivier de Sagazan’s work, it can appear rather morbid and provocative at first glance. He sees his creations as a way to shake up our conscience and to underline the exceptional character of life.

For our first collaboration with the artist in 2016, we hosted his performance “Transfiguration” as a preamble to his exhibition. It consisted of a one man show, in which a man in a suit arrived on stage and gradually entered into a form of trance to disfigure himself, sometimes vociferating, and used clay and paint to cover his face and body.

This confrontation produced a certain effect on the public. After the performance, I still remember seeing some quasi-bloodless faces amongst our guests. A friend that I met in the crowd also seemed a bit shaken. He was not yet a collector of Sagazan’s works (he would become one later on!), and his stance was rather reserved, not really knowing the nature of the feelings that ran through him. He really had to take the time to digest it, he told me…

As for me, at times I could not escape a sort of amazement from this character, the artist who had suddenly become unknown to me, transforming himself before our eyes. I had a confused feeling, without knowing precisely that something primordial had been elevated from this experience.

And yet, this was not unknown territory. During the preparation of the exhibition, we visited his “workshop-capharnaüm” in Saint Nazaire and discovered a plethora of creations which evoked a strange universe to me. Sculptures, paintings of bodies, and creatures shaped from the earth—a form of reinvented bestiary—were all over the studio…

The first feeling that came to me when my gaze landed on these disemboweled, bruised, flayed bodies, inevitably referred to a mortiferous feeling. Although, something else came to the fore almost immediately: a more poetic reading. Yes, they were damaged bodies, but they were also faces devoid of pain or sadness. His creatures seemed to freeze for eternity. Sagazan’s world was not so disturbing, and the slightly macabre impression from before was largely overcome.

As his next exhibition, Etre Chair, will confirm, after uprooting there is rooting, or at least an attempt to do so. The artist proposes a dialogue between his sculptures and a series of landscapes undertaken during Covid, a time when he felt the need to connect with nature even more strongly. The majority of his landscapes exclude the bodies that he used to include. With the notable exception, however, of a painting representing an undergrowth in which we see, connected, by the roots, a buried body that emerges on the surface.”

– by Bruno Blosse, artistic director of Loo&Lou Gallery, Paris

Born in 1959 at Brazzaville in Congo, Olivier de Sagazan lives and works in Saint-Nazaire.

Trained as a biologist, he is interested in the living and, through his pieces, seeks to establish a sort of genealogy of the sensibility. He aims to better understand how, at some point, inert material structured by cells engenders life and sensitivity.

For about 25 years, Olivier de Sagazan’s work has principally revolved around the human body. In parallel with his creations – paintings, sculptures, installations – de Sagazan produces performances, popularly seen by the entire world, during which he utilizes his own body as a mold, with clay and paint as his mediums. Converting his face and body, he manoeuvers through choreographed gestures, alloting for radical metamorphoses.

The artist predominantly uses clay and plants that he gathers and kneads in order to create lifelike material. From these elements, a polymorphic world appears composed of different characters like a bestiary where humans intertwine with animals.

EXHIBITIONS (extracts)

2025

• «Toujours, jamais !» – exhibition, Loo & Lou Gallery, Paris (France)
  «Transfiguration» – performance, Azayah production, Sao Paulo (Brazil)
  «De la Sainte-Face à la tête-viande» – exposition & «Transfiguration» – performance, CNN, Namur (Belgium)

2024

• Salon Tout Art – exhibition, Paris (France)
  «La Messe de l’âne» – performance, Ljubljana Puppet Theater, Ljubljana (Slovenia)
  «Bosh and Beyond» – exhibition, Kühlhaus, Berlin (Germany)
  «Nos cœurs en terre» – performance with David Wahl, DansFabrick, Brest (France)
  «Il nous est arrivé quelque chose» – performance, La Tangram Scène nationale, Évreux (France)

2023

• «Transfiguration», performance and exhibition, Théâtre de Namur, Namur (Belgium)
  Painting and sculpture exhibition, Galerie Marie Vitoux, Paris (France)
  Workshop, Movement research Project, Sithonie (Greece)
  «Hybridation» – performance, Teatro Calderon, Valladolid (Spain)
  Participation to the film «Orenda» by Pirjo Honkasalo, Tallin (Estonia)

2022

• «Hands do not touch your precious Me» – performance, Cultuur centrum, Hasselt (Belgium) & Brengenz (Autriche) & Naples (Italia) & Luxembourg & Amsterdam (Holland)
• «La Messe de l’Âne» -performance, Espace Georges Sadoul, Saint-Dié-des-Vosges (France)
• «Être Chair» – exhibition, Loo & Lou Gallery, Paris (France)

2021

• 06/11/20 at 26/01/2021 Exhibition Centre cultural LES BERNARDES (Girona, Spain)
• 16/01/21 Hands do not touch our precious Me (show with Wim Vandekeybus) Livestream KVS Brussel
• 21/01/2021 Livestream Mime London Festival
• 11-12-13/06 “La Messe de l’Âne” Festival Brigittines Brussel
• 25-26/06 “Transfiguration” FRAC Besançon France
• 4-11/ 07/21 Vive le Sujet Festival Avignon avec David Wahl
• 15-21 Hands do not touch our precious Me KVS Brussel
• 27/07/21 “La Messe de l’Âne”  Biennale Dance in Venice
• 2-3/09/21 Hybridation Unidram festival Postdam Germany
• 5/09/21 Transfiguration Lviv festival Ukraine
• 09/09/21 Hands do not touch our precious Me Rovereto Italy
• 20-21/09/21 “La Messe de l’Âne” Festival mondial des théâtres de marionnettes de Charleville-Mézières
• 25-26/09/21 performance Transfiguration 7th International Festival of Puppet Theater WEITBLICK
• 03/10/21 Hands do not touch our precious Me Ieper Belgium
• 08/10/21 Hands do not touch our precious Me. Ferrara Italy
• 12-13/10 Hands do not touch our precious Me Leuven

2020

• 22-23/01 “Hybridation” Théatre Lliure Barcelone
• 05/02 “Transfiguration” Festival Imaginale Mannheim Germany
• 04/03 “Ainsi sois Moi” (Première) DansFabrik Brest
• 14/03 – “Transfiguration” Weekend Singulier Le lieu Unique, Nantes, France cancelled
• 23-28 /03 Workshop Estonia cancelled
• 11/04 “Transfiguration” FestivalTrente/Trente Sainte France cancelled
• 11-12-13/06 “Ainsi sois Moi” Festival Brigittines Brussel cancelled
• 19/06 “Transfiguration” Figura Theater Festival Baden Swiss cancelled
• 21/06 “Transfiguration” festival Puppen Magdebourg Germany cancelled
• 25,26/06 “Transfiguration” FRAC Besançon France cancelled
• 4-11/ 07 Vive le Sujet Festival Avignon avec David Wahl cancelled
• 05/09 Performance  festival “Kit Gavatovycha“ Lviv Ukraine. cancelled
• 1/10 to 15/11 exhibition Galerie Vitoux Paris
• 10/10 Transfiguration . FIMP’20 Porto
• 30 /10/ 2020, Première : Hands do not touch your precious Me. Teatro Comunale di Ferrara Italy. cancelled
• 5/11 Transfiguration UNIDRAM International Theatre Festival Potsdam cancelled
• 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 / 11 , Hands do not touch your precious Me KVS, Brussels Belgium cancelled
• 15/11. Transfiguration. Le lieu Unique, Nantes, France

2019

• 10-11/01 – Performance, London Mime International Festival, Londres
• 24-25/01 – Workshop, Festival 30/30, Bordeaux, Franc
• 26/01 – Performance Hybridation, Festival 30/30, Bordeaux, France
• 8/03 – Workshop, L’Artère, Lévis, Quebec
• 18/04 – 15/07 – Exhibition, Centre Bellegarde, Toulouse, France
• 18/04 – Performance, Chapelle des Carmélites, Toulouse, France
• 04/05 – Performance, La Fira de Titelles, Lleida, Spain
• 18/05– Performance, Amen&Beyond, Gand, Belgium
• 30-31/05 – Performance, International Puppet Theatre Festival, Erlangen, Germany
• 14/06 -Performance, A Part Festival, Katowice, Poland
• 30/06 Hybridation Full spin Festival Essen Germany
• 24/07 Performance, MIT Ribadavia, Spain
• 27-31/07 – Workshop, Jardin Parallèle, Reims, France
• 01-10/08 – Résidence Corps-Textes, Jardin Parallèle, Reims, France
• 18-20/08 – Performance, Noorderzon Performing Arts Festival, Groningen, NL
• 28/08 Nominated to the Biennale de Venise with ” O” Director Qiu Yang
• 30-31/08 – Performance, Festival International Les Brigittines, Brussel, Belgium
• 9-15/09 – Résidence Corps-Textes, Théâtre MacOrlan, Brest, France
• 17-29/09 – Résidence Corps-Textes, le PALC, Châlons-en-Champagne, France
• 07/10 – Performance, Dance House Lemesos, Cyprus
• 04/11 to 09/01 2020 – Museum of Art in Figueres – Catalonia Exhibition Video « Hybridation »
• 07/11 – Spectacle “Ainsi sois Moi“C, Scène Nationale – Le Théatre, Saint-Nazaire, France
• 17/12, 18/12, 7 pm. Performance “Transfiguration” Serendipity Art Festival Goa INDE

2018

• 27/03 – Performance, Weekend Singulier, Lieu Unique, Nantes, France  
• 14/04 – Performance Transfiguration, Festival Rencontre entre les Mondes, Chabeuil, France  
• 12/05 – Exhibition, Gallery Contemporary Cluster, Rome, Italy
• 19/05 – Performance Transfiguration, Contemporary Cluster, Rome, Italy
• 02/06 – Performance, Puppet Festival – Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal
• 27-28/06 – Masterclass, International Forest Festival, Thessaloniki, Greece
• 29/06 – Performance Hybridation and Transfiguration, Theatre of Lazarists Monastery – Forest Festival, Thessaloniki, Greece 
• 09/10 – 11/07 – Masterclass, L’embobineuse, Marseille, France
• 13-14/07 – Performance, Kalamata Dance Festival, Greece
• 01/08 – 12/08 – Actor and performer in a VR movie realised by Qiu Yang, China
• 26/08-02/09 – Residence Corps-Textes, Scène Nationale – Le Théatre, Saint-Nazaire, France
• 07/09 – Performance, Gesture 01″ at the Old Baths, London
• 15/09 – Performance, CERCO, Saragosse, Spain
• 06/10 – Performance Transfiguration, Théâtre Mac Orlan – Festival La Becquée, Brest, France
• 06/11 – 22/12 – Exhibition, Loo and Lou Gallery, Paris, France
• 14-18/11 – Golden Horse festival, VR Film with Qiu Yang, Taipei, Taiwan

2017

• 7/01 – 7/02 – Exhibition, Chapelle Ste Anne, Tours, France   
• 15-17/01 – Performance, Petit Faucheux, Tours, France
• 3/02 – Performance, Festival Allotropique, ESBA, Tours, France
• 7/03 – 14/05 – Exhibition, Ugly as art, Moa,  Seoul, Korea
• 21/04 – Exhibition Etres Chairs, Chapelle des Franciscains, Saint-Nazaire, France
• 28/04 – Performance, Orbis Pictus, Reims, France
• 13/05 – Colloque “Généalogie de la sensibilité” and Performance, Lieu Unique, Nantes, France
• 13/05 – Orlan et Olivier de Sagazan, BP17 Buenos Aires, Argentina
• 10/06 – 9/09 – Exhibition, “La imaginacion del desastre”,  Buenos Aires, Argentina
• 14/06 – Performance, Théâtre de Jérusalem, Israël
• Sept – Fashion Week, Nick Knight and Gareth Pugh offer an exclusive visual insight into Pugh’s S/S 18, London
• 4-15/09 – Actor in the movie “The Mute”, Director Bartosz Konopka, Poland
• 24-28/09 – Performance, Festival Sudaka, Quieto, Ecuador 
• 9/11 – 31/12 – Exhibition, Musée d’art de Kauno, M.Žilinsko galerijoje nuo lapkričio, Lithuania
• 16/11 – 22/12 – Exhibition, Galery Vitoux, Paris, France 

2016

• 2-3/02 – Performance, Musée de la Croix Rouge, Geneva, Switzerland
• 20-25/02 – Masterclass, University of the Art London, Polverigi, Italy
• 26-28/05 – Performance, Chuncheon International Mime Festival, Korea
• 15/06 – Performance, Théâtre Déjazet, avec la Loo&Lou Gallery, Paris, France.
• 17/06 – 30/07 – Exhibition, Loo et Lou Gallery, Paris, France
• 22-26/06 – Masterclass et Performance, Central St Martin, London 
• July – Collaboration as actor in Channel Zero, Winnipeg, Canada
• 16/07 – 16/09 – Exhibition SNACK, Power Station Of Art,  Shanghai, China
• 17/07 – Performance and Masterclass, Power Station Of Art, Shanghai, China
• 12/09 – Performance Transfiguration, Biennale d’art performatif, Rouyn-Noranda, Canada
• 16/09 – Performance Transfiguration, Festival Phenomena, Montreal, Canada
• 26, 27, 28/09 – Immersive Room with FKA Twigs, London
• 12/11 – Performance, Biennale, Shanghai
• 18/11 – Performance, Submerge Festival, Bristol, England
• 25/11 – Performance, Galerie KUB, Leipzig, Germany  

AURÉLIE DEGUEST

Joren Van Acker

CURRICULUM VITAE

Xavier Servas

CURRICULUM VITAE

Simon Laveuve

“Born in 1988, I’m originally from the Paris suburbs, where I still live. I grew up in a concrete tower, designed by the committed architect Renée Gailhoustet, who built all the social housing in Ivry-sur-Seine. Surrounded by dormitory towns, housing estates and the industrial zone, it was above all the town’s spatial layout, created in collaboration with Jean Renaudie, that inevitably left its mark on me.

My career path, too, has had an impact on my inspirations. As an author-photographer for over 10 years, I’ve worked in the fashion, music, reportage and publishing worlds… Specializing in portraiture and still life, people and their environment have always been at the heart of my work.

Since 2016, I’ve been building my own world in miniature, combining volume and staging. Habitat and survival are two central elements of my approach. Self-taught in the world of sculpture and modeling, I use a lot of salvaged elements. I like the principle of second life and recycling through art for creation. Detail, reading and meaning are directly linked to my earlier photographic work.

What most of my pieces have in common is that they feature a shelter. A shelter for man, made by man, whose figure is not necessarily present. I like to work on height and the inaccessible. Protection and abandonment. Fallen icons and their symbolisms. Resistance and insubordination.”

CURRICULUM VITAE

Frantz Metzger

Bron in 1980. Lives and works in Lyon. 

My painting develops around questions linked to the apprehension of reality and its restitution as appearance or image.

The figure, whether human or animal, occupies a central place, first and foremost formally, but also as an object of reflection. Through the interplay of metaphors, analogies and correspondences, the figure can carry meaning as a mirror of temporal life.

“Inner, silent encounters between body and nature”, the appearance and annihilation of figures, led back to the abyss from which they sprang: life, death, earth and sky.

This painting remains an unfinished attempt, an effort to “communicate the incommunicable”, the renewed desire to create images, the place where the distant meets the now in a flash.

CURRICULUM VITAE

ANDREW NTSHABELE

Ntshabele has quickly developed a personal technique through painting figures in acrylic on large format supports made of collaged newspapers.

Andrew Ntshabele depicts characters that he observes on the streets of Johannesburg as a reflection of the negative physical, socio-economic, and political changes of the post-apartheid city of Johannesburg. Selectively choosing newspaper backgrounds with pertinent headlines, he paints over them with the resulting pressure and strain on citizens who live and work in a polluted city. Photographing and meeting his subjects around the city prompted him to investigate these difficulties in order to understand the root causes of the degradation of the city center.

After the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Andrew Ntshabele would like viewers to confront his art from a new perspective and try to find happiness in these difficult times. Within some of his recent work, more joyful feelings are present. For this new series, he explores both medium and large supports using newspaper articles about Covid-19.

Born in 1986 in a small town in South Africa, he studied at the University of Art in Johannesburg and graduated in 2013 with a major in painting. Since then, he has been living and working in Johannesburg. 

“I believe and know that the old world as we know it is a thing of the past…we are entering a digital age and now more than ever it is important to preserve history and document it. I am fascinated and excited to do this through my art.”

– Andrew Ntshabele

Tana Borissova

Tana Borissova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1978. She has been living and working in Paris, France since 1997. She became interested in art through books that she discovered during her childhood. While studying in a high school of applied arts in Sofia, her desire to create art was awoken when she began creating oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings. When she arrived in Paris at the age of nineteen, she was accepted to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts (ENSBA), where she studied with Vladimir Velickovic and Dominique Gauthier. She graduated in 2003.

In her work, Borissova explores the body, the space within it, and its interactions with the outside world. She does so by referencing nature and its metamorphoses, movements, momentum, and contradictions that go beyond a scale of time.

The gallery Myriam Bouagal exhibited her first solo show, Corps, in January 2014, as well as her second show in June 2015, Ma place mon corps, which included inks and paintings. In September 2017, she presented her work in the Arrivage Gallery in Troyes. She published a collection of inks and texts for the occasion. In May 2019, she presented a selection of her inks and paintings with Loo & Lou Gallery during the JustLX art fair in Lisbon, Portugal at the Museu da Carris. From January to March 2020, the Loo & Lou Atelier hosted an exhibition of her paintings entitled Éclats de nuit.

Serge Rezvani, Repentir I AA, Oil on canvas, 195 x 195 cm, 1962/1992 © Thierry Cohen

Serge Rezvani was born in Teheran on March 23, 1928, to a Persian father, a dancer and magician, and a Russian mother, a violinist and horsewoman.

Arriving in France at the age of one, his childhood was spent in the middle of nowhere, tossed about by the sufferings of a sick mother who led him to unbelievable Russian emigrant boarding houses, where only his precocious drawing skills enabled him to preserve himself, to exist by being admired a little.

Fleeing the terror of this prison world, at age 15 he hid under a false identity in German-occupied Paris, taking refuge in the workshops of the illustrious Académie de la Grande-Chaumière.

“I wanted to live painting, not produce paintings. I kept nothing that came out of my hands; drawings fell to the ground without my bothering to pick them up; for months I painted on the same canvas, which I scraped away when the layer became too thick. I loved the act of painting, I loved the life that the act of painting imposed, I loved the extraordinary tension that somehow took me out of myself when, standing in front of the canvas, I was no longer me but what was being done on the canvas.”

At the age of 17, a chance meeting with Paul Eluard led to the production of Elle se fait élever un palais dans la forêt, a rare book, published in an edition of 16 copies, illustrated with Serge’s engravings and a moving premonition of the wonderful love story he would have a few years later with Lula.

Serge and his friends, painters Jacques Lanzmann, Pierre Dmitrienko and sculptor Raymond Mason, believed in the power of the artist to change the world, and in painting as destiny.

The shimmer of his early works, humble compositions in rabbit-skin glue on burlap canvas, is perfectly at home in the informal art scene, too hastily dubbed the Second School of Paris. Critical and commercial success (exhibitions at Maeght (Les Mains éblouies), Arnaud, Berggrüen, Lucien Durand, Jacqueline Ranson in Paris and Hanover in London), painfully questioned Rezvani’s relationship with painting.

Having adopted Picasso’s dictum that it’s not what the artist does that counts, it’s what he is, he decided to flee Paris and the unbreathable climate of the art trade, to live with the absolute love of his life, Danièle-Lula, whom he had met in 1950.

It was in the Massif des Maures, a continent unique in the world, a place closed in on itself, that the couple settled in a small isolated house, La Béate. In this happy retreat, Rezvani assumes his desire for absolute distance, to be on the side, to deny the society of numbers in a simple and total quest for truth. Paradoxically, his painting expresses deep anguish, the traumatic overtones of a brutal experience. This duality between torment and joy illustrates the parallel lives of an artist who has always refused to cheat.

Then came the transition from brush to pen, isolation slowly imposing writing.

In the meantime, Serge, under the pseudonym Bassiak (va-nu-pieds in Russian), had passed on his tenderness and humor in a number of famous songs (Le Tourbillon (de la vie), Ma ligne de chance…) that delighted filmmakers François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard and their audiences, and today belong to a certain collective memory.

Les Années-Lumière (1967), Les Années Lulla (1968), Le Portrait ovale (1976) and Le Testament amoureux (1981) are passionate books that tell the story of their author’s life, and are among the milestones of Serge’s prolific literary and theatrical output, as he likes to call himself a multi-disciplinary artist. So, if painting is sometimes absent, it soon returns, for the author, nourished and enriched by the experience of writing, now knows that his hand can reveal what the brain doesn’t know.

Thus, in 1971, Les horreurs de la guerre électronique (The horrors of electronic warfare), presented at the Toiles sur le Vietnam exhibition at the ARC, the contemporary department of the Musée d’art moderne in Paris. These were large-scale canvases against the war then being waged by the United States in Vietnam.

Then there’s the formidable series of large canvases painted in 1974 and chosen to be shown in the still unfinished Centre Pompidou, a marvellous visionary declamation that can only be conceived as the paintings of someone who writes.

From then on, a subtle interplay governed the links between Serge’s painting and his writing. Thus, in 1992, following Repentirs, paintings from the 1960s reworked thirty years later, echoes the 1993 publication by Stock [of] Repentirs du peintre. Multi-disciplinary!

This fertile duality, appeased and tamed, finds one of its ultimate and sublime echoes in Les Réserves, initiated in the late 1990s, shortly before Lula’s death in 2004.

“I write as I paint, and I paint as I write,” says Serge Rezvani, a free man who has always refused to “live what I don’t want, in order to live what I don’t know.”

EXHIBITIONS (Extracts)

1947
Groupe « Les Mains Éblouies »
Galerie Maeght – Paris

1948
Groupe « Les Mains Éblouies »
Galerie Maeght – Paris

1949
Groupe « Les Mains Éblouies »
Galerie Maeght – Paris

1950
Galerie M.A.I. – Paris

1951
Galerie Arnaud – Paris

1953
Galerie Berggrüen – Paris

1955
Galerie La Licorne – Bruxelles
Galerie Kléber – Paris

1957
Galerie Diderot – Paris

1959
Galerie Lucien Durand – Paris

1960 
Galerie Lucien Durand – Paris

1961
Hanover Gallery – Londres

1964
Galerie Saint-Germain – Paris
Galerie Cavalero – Cannes

1966
Galerie Jacqueline Ramson – Paris
Galerie Cavalero – Cannes

1969
Galerie Cavalero – Cannes

1971
« Les horreurs de la guerre électronique »
Musée d’Art Moderne – A R C – Paris

1975
« Les plages »
Centre Georges Pompidou (Centre Culturel du Marais) – Paris

1987
OEuvres abstraites de 1947 à 1952
Galerie Callu Mérite – Paris

1988
OEuvres abstraites de 1947 à 1952 – 2ème partie
Galerie Callu Mérite – Paris

1994
« Repentirs » et « Blanches »
Galerie Lucie Weill & Seligmann – Paris

1999
« Donna »
Galeria del Leone – Venise

2012
« Ils croient jouer au football… » 
Galerie Guillaume – Paris

Collections

LaM -Villeneuve d’ascorbique
Musée de Nantes
Musée de Saint Etienne
Centre Pompidou

Stained glasses

Église Sainte Anne – Saint-Nazaire
Église Saint Nicolas – Oye-et-Pallet

Bourgogne-Franche-Comté

MARK POWELL

Born in 1980 in Leeds (UK). Lives and works in Brighton (UK).

From a poor background, Mark Powell began working at the age of 11 to buy food and clothing and to help pay the rent of the family home. After working a number of jobs, he attended the English National University of Huddersfield for three years, studying drawing and painting – he graduated in 2006. On old and/or used paper – envelopes, road maps, subway maps, playing cards, newspaper sheets – the artist draws exclusively with a ballpoint pen (Biro), “the simplest and most readily available”. The artist, for whom the portrait is the major exercise, affirms: “The individual is a fascinating thing, of intrigues and scars. I reject a society fed with images of perfection”. His subject wants to question our common perception of “acceptable beauty”. It is a question here of transcribing less the physical aspect than a presence judged “brightness of the true”. This notion of beauty is never to be appreciated according to any aesthetic scale, it is not either to be situated in an idealism, but to be considered in a poetized realism. By its visible restitution of lived truths, it is for Mark Powell a materialized definition of “the beauty of the world”. The artist exhibits in the United States, Europe and England.

– Text Anne Richard / HEY! modern art & pop culture (Excerpt from the exhibition catalog HEY! The Drawing, 2022)

EXPOSITIONS

2019
Group shows Hang Up Gallery, London, UK
2018
Hang Up Ten Hang Up Gallery, London, UK
2017
Justanothergallery, San Diego, USA
2016
Solo show Castle Galleries Mayfair, London, UK
3 man show avec Shepard Fairey Subliminal Projects, Los Angeles, USA
Solo show Moniker Art Fair, London, UK
2015
Solo show Graham Baker Gallery, London, UK 
2011 à 2014
The Other Art Fair, London, UK

SYLC

Born in France in 1973 and graduated from the National School of Applied Arts and Crafts Olivier de Serres in Paris. Lives and works in Vallée de Chevreuse (78), a few kilometers from Paris.

From painting to drawing, including sculpture, the visual artist SylC places humanity at the center of her work. Strongly tinged with dreamlike elements, her work reveals our true identity, our paradoxes, our dualities… By frequently associating the human with the animal or the plant, the artist highlights the ties woven between beings and those we maintain with nature. She emphasizes hybridization and metamorphosis, symbols of the complexity of our personalities, but also of adaptation, renewal, and the perpetual evolution of our identity. The bodies are treated with delicacy and transparency, as if to better detach the soul from the corporeal envelope. SylC is also interested in the delicate transition from childhood to adulthood, the loss of innocence that ensues, and our gradual construction as individuals.

As if to awaken us further, the artist deliciously plays with our senses, using the space between the viewer and the artwork as a revealer. She seeks to evoke intimate sensations and perceptions in us, bringing forth emotions and deep feelings that suddenly make us so human…

Through this approach, SylC appeals to our unconscious and unveils what is not visible. Her work strives to trace back to the origin of things, embarking on a journey to the source where the sayable and the unsayable collide. Behind SylC’s ethereal and phantasmagorical visions, a certain reality is nevertheless discernible. But the artist encourages us, in the exploration of her mysterious work, to look beyond, urging us to discover new territories, infinite and still unknown to our perception.

SylC collaborates with galleries in France, Europe, and the USA. From the early 2010s, the artist dedicates a significant part of her work to several thematic projects, resulting in series such as Mothers, La ronde des chiens fous, Le parfum des saisons, Human Birds, Osmose(s), Avec ou sans cavalier, Deep into the Wild, and Reflet(s).

At the invitation of public institutions, her work has been featured in solo exhibitions, including at the Chapelle and Cloître des Dames Blanches (City of La Rochelle), the Chapelle des Jésuites (City of Chaumont), and the Château d’Eau (City of Bourges).

Present in public collections (FDAC de l’Orne, Cities of Le Mans, La Rochelle, Maisons-Laffitte, Guyancourt) and private ones, SylC is the recipient of numerous awards in Switzerland and France, including two from the Fondation Taylor. Four monographs have been published on her works in recent years.

EXPOSITIONS

2024
Reflet(s), Loo & Lou Gallery, Paris, France
Un autre monde, Centre André Malraux, Le Pecq, France
2023
Présence(s), Conseil départemental de l’Orne, Alençon, France
Galerie Paragone, Bergues, France
The Artistic red dot Gallery, La Saunerie, Parcé-sur-Sarthe, France
Comparaisons, Grand Palais Éphémère, Groupe “Résonances intérieures”
2022
Supplément d’âme, Mairie de Bordeaux, cour Mably, Bordeaux, France
2021
Les liens subtils, Galerie Openbach, Paris, France
Art Fair Lyon Art Paper, Lyon, France
Chapitre(s), Natacha Dassault Art Gallery, Paris, France
A season in Naxos III, Petalouda Art Gallery, Naxos, Greece
2020
Collection du FIAA – Fonds international d’art actuel, Le Mans, France
A season in Naxos II, Petalouda Art Gallery, Naxos, Greece
2019
Poésie, Galerie Estelle Lebas, Lille-Haubourdin, France
Art Fair Lyon Art Paper, Lyon, France
Avec ou sans cavalier, Centre Ianchelevici, Maisons-Laffitte, France
A season in Naxos I, Petalouda Art Gallery, Naxos, Greece
Art Fair Lille Art Up, Galerie Audrey Marty (Saint-Malo), Lille, France
2018
Osmose(s), Galerie Olivier Rousseau, Tours, France
Résonance(s), Galerie d’art actuel socles & cimaises, Nancy, France
2017
Works on paper, Galerie Audrey Marty, Saint-Malo, France
Humanimale, Chapelle des Jésuites, Chaumont, France
Ethereal Visions, Art in Gstaad Gallery, Gstaad, Switzerland
2016
Gosti & SylC, Galerie Au-delà des apparences, Annecy, France
Human birds, Espace Saint-Pierre, Avallon, France
SylC, Hall Spassov Gallery, Seattle, United-States
Invited Puls’art, Pavillon Monod, Le Mans, France
Le parfum des saisons, Chapelle des Ursulines, Lannion, France
2015
Trois expositions dans la ville, Chapelle des dames blanches, Cloître des dames blanches & Hôtel de Ville, La Rochelle, France
La ronde des chiens fous, Le Château d’eau, Bourges, France

Flo Arnold, Installation, papier hydrofuge sur laiton gainé, led, 600 x 340 cm, 2018 © Flo Arnold

FLO ARNOLD

Flo Arnold was born in France and grew up in Casablanca, Morocco. She currently lives and works between Morocco and France. She has had many solo shows in France and abroad, notably at the Marrakesh Biennial in Morocco in 2014 and in 2016, and at the Loo & Lou Gallery in Paris, France in 2018. She also presented with the Loo & Lou Foundation in 2018 the monumental installation Le secret des signes during “Nuit Blanche” at the Church of Saint Paul in Paris, France. Additionally, Arnold participated in several group shows, including ones at the Foundation Pierre Berger and the Institut du Monde Arabe in 2013, at the Musée de la Palmeraie in Marrakesh, Morocco, in 2014, and at the Institut Bernard Magrez, in Bordeaux, France, in 2017, among others.

The crossing of cultures is a key element in her work and has been forged by her many trips through Africa, Europe, and the United States. Her installations display an existential nomadism with artistic gestures that are born from her journeys. In 2016, she participated in the Biennale de Marrakech, where she exhibited her waterproof paper on coated brass installations for the first time at the Musée de la Palmeraie. 

Her creations are often backlit and sometimes supplemented with sound. She uses Japanese white paper to suggest ephemerality and fragility, but also a kind of evanescence emphasized by the appearance of levitation. Arnold’s sculptures indeed appear to be floating, and create a space for contemplation and spirituality. 

“My life is the story of earth and encounters, my identity ‘citizen of the world’. My childhood influenced my artistic research, always in motion, changing countries, houses, cultures. I’ve learned a lot from the people around me.”

In the Loo & Lou Atelier, she installed a piece in situ entitled Vertige du Monde. A germination of organic, backlit paper devoured the space as if it were overgrown vegetation, that was accompanied by a soundtrack. The interior space disappeared under a spotless “waterfall.” With this piece, she emphasized that in order to forget the dizziness of the world around us, we must live in a sphere without borders nor limitations in the search for our inner peace.
More recently, his installation “le sens des mondes” was presented in 2023 at the “Constellations” international festival in Metz.

Collections/Prizes:

Fondation TGCC / Room Mate Collection / First Prize – JustMad2019 / Arts Garden, City of Marrakesh/ Mamda Foundation, Rabat / Saadi Palace, Marrakesh / BMCE BANK, Marocco / Société Générale, Morocco / CNIA Insurance / San Francisco Food Bank / The Royal Palace, Morocco / Palmeraie Museum, Marrakesh

EXHIBITIONS

2023
Mon Maroc “Je croyais rêver”, E. Delacroix, Loo&Lou Gallery, Paris, France
Constellations, Art & Jardins, Portes des Allemands, Metz, France
Fondation TGCC, Casablanca, Morocco
Abla Ababou Gallery, Rabat, Morocco
2022
Abcynth Gallery, Lille, France
Palm beach Modern + Contemporain, Bogena Gallery, Miami, United States of America
International Paper Art Biennial, Haacht, Belgium
Art Fair, Aquilaluna Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
2021
Château de Montaigu, 6 weekends d’Art Contemporain, Nancy, France
Bogena Gallery, Saint-Paul de Vence, France
Thema Gallery, Casablanca, Morocco
Aquilaluna Gallery, Dalhem, Belgium
Christine Colon Gallery, Liège, Belgium
Abla Ababou Gallery, Rabat, Morocco
2020
ARTPARIS Bogena Gallery, Grand Palais, Paris, France
Art Fair JustMad, Loo&Lou Gallery, Madrid, Spain
Les Nébuleuses, Mairie de Guyancourt, France
2019
La Transparence des Choses, Le Prieuré de Pont Loup, Moret sur Loing, France
ARTPARIS, Grand Palais, Loo&Lou Gallery, Paris, France
La bel FRICHE Gallery, Nogent-le-Rotrou, France
Art Fair JustMad, Loo&Lou Gallery, Madrid, Spain
2018
Galerie Noir sur Blanc, Marrakech, Morocco
Nuit Blanche, Fondation Loo&Lou/Mairie de Paris, Paris, France
Loo&Lou Gallery, L’Atelier, Paris, France
Le Clos des Cimaises, St Georges du Bois, France
Abla Ababou Gallery, Rabat, Morocco
Organic, Aquilaluna Gallery, Knokke le Zoute, Belgium
2017
Exhibition, 6.4 Gallery, Marrakech, Morocco.
Macparis, group exhibition, Bastille Design Center, Paris, France
Un pas de côté, group exhibition, Église des Célestins, Avignon, France.
Never Give Up, group exhibition, Institut Bernard Magrez, Bordeaux, France.
Effleurage, group exhibition, space Souffle, Casablanca, Morocco.
2016
Les instants vidéo. État d’urgence poétique, Friche la belle de mai, Marseille, France.
No boundaries, 29 Gallery, Évian, France.
Biennale de Marrakech, Musée de la Palmeraie, Marrakech, Morocco.
Guest of honor, group exhibition, Fauv’Art, Ferney Voltaire, France.
Group exhibition, Arielle d’Hauterives Gallery, Bruxelles, Belgium.
2015
Songe de matières, exposition de sculptures, Espace Expressions CDG Gallery, Rabat, Morocco. 
2014
Biennale de Marrakech, Yahin & Boaz Gallery, Marrakech, Morocco.
Insoumission, Musée de la Palmeraie, 2ème forum international des droits de l’homme, Marrakech, Morocco.
Pop Up, Vogelsang Gallery, New York, United-States of America.
2013
Exhibition, Saint James Gallery, Bordeaux, France.
SYRIART, Fondation Pierre Berger, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France.
2012
Noir sur Blanc Gallery, Marrakech, Morocco.
2011
Loft Art Gallery, Casablanca, Morocco.
Biennale de Marrakech, Marie Vitoux Gallery, Paris, France
2010
Biennale de Marrakech, Loft Gallery, Casablanca, Morocco.
2009
Exhibition, Loft Art Gallery, Casablanca, Morocco.

FLO ARNOLD

Vertige du Monde
Exhibition from 26.04.18 to 09.06.18
VIDEO : Footage of exhibition, Vertige du Monde

Collision, huile sur toile, 146 x 114 cm, 2018, © Christophe Miralles

Christophe Miralles

Christophe Miralles is a Franco-Spanish artist who lives and works between Burgundy and Casablanca. He has received many prizes such as the Azart Prize in 2005. His work has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions in France and abroad, integrating various collections.

From his roots in Morocco, one can note the influences that resonate between the two shores of the Mediterranean, which never cease to collide with one another. Undoubtedly, Spanish painting from the Golden Age has sealed his relationship with light.

Human figures suspended in the air haunt his canvases, inducing feelings of worry mixed with a certain nostalgia. The combination of simplified forms and subtle nuances in colors allows him to give a timeless aspect to his paintings, where the material is the main subject.

Miralles creates oil and lacquer paintings on paper and canvas. He brought together a series of paintings for an exhibition at Loo & Lou gallery entitled Territoire Unique in April 2018. His work is based on themes of humanity, travel, and tolerance. Colors burn through his canvases, engorging them in flames, with the ashes slowly falling on his large, black papers. He is a painter anchored in contemporary society, a territory that he hopes is unique for each person.

Prix:

Grand prix Claire Combes, Fondation Taylor / Grand prix Azart / Prix Charles Oulmont – Mention du jury

EXHIBITIONS

2023
Mon Maroc “Je croyais rêver”, E. Delacroix, Loo&Lou Gallery, Paris, France
Ories Gallery, Lyon, France
Point Rouge Gallery, Saint Rémy de Provence, France
2022
Art Fair JUSTMAD Madrid avec Loo&Lou Gallery, Madrid, Spain
2021
Aquilaluna Gallery, Dalhem, Belgium
Crid’Art Gallery, Metz, France
2020
Marie Vitoux Gallery, Paris, France
2019
Noir sur Blanc Gallery, Marrakech, Morocco
Le Prieuré de Pont Loup, Moret sur Loing, France
Art Fair JUSTMAD Madrid avec Loo&Lou Gallery, Madrid, Spain
2018
Thema Gallery, Casablanca, Morocco
Danielle Bourdette Gallery, Honfleur, France
Loo&Lou Gallery, Paris, France
Le Clos des Cimaises Gallery, St Georges du Bois, France
Crid’Art Gallery, Metz, France
2017
Effleurage, Espace souffle, Casablanca, Morocco.
Group exhibition, Thema Gallery, Casablanca, Morocco.
2016
Exhibition, Marie Vitoux Gallery, Paris, France.
Exhibition, Bresson Gallery, Béziers, France.
Exhibition, Collection (1.0), Charnay, France.
Biennale de Marrakech, BAB, Marrakech, Morocco.
Prix Tony Tollet, group exhibition, Ecully, France.
Biennale de Cachan, Cachan, France.
Group exhibition, Contemporary art center, Serviès en Val, France.
Group exhibition, Dar El Kitab Gallery, Casablanca, Morocco.
Group exhibition, Soart Gallery, Casablanca, Morocco.
2015
Exhibition, Melting Art Gallery, Lille, France.
Art up, contemporary art  fair , Lille, France.
Group exhibition, Chantal Mélanson Gallery, Annecy, France.
Group exhibition, Dar El Kitab Gallery, Casablanca, Morocco.
Group exhibition, Egregore Gallery, Marmande, France.
BAB draw, Gueliz, Marrakech, Morocco.
Group exhibition, Crid’Art Gallery, Metz, France.
2014
Exhibition, Marie Vitoux Gallery, Paris, France.
Exhibition, Christine Colon Gallery, Liège, Belgium.
Exhibition with Flo Arnold, space Chapelle Saint Avoye, La Clayette, France.
Biennale de Marrakech, Yakin&Boaz Gallery, Marrakech, Morocco.
Insoumission, Musée de la Palmeraie, Marrakech, Marco.
Group exhibition, Danielle Bourdette Gallery, Honfleur, France.
Group exhibition, Martine Ehmer Gallery, Bruxelles, Belgium.
Group exhibition, Dar El Kitab Gallery, Casablanca, Morocco.
Biennale de Marrakech with the Yakin&Boaz Gallery, Marrakech, Morocco.
Genèse, group exhibition, Fondation Taylor, Association Rémanence, Paris, France.
2013
Les Arts en balade, guest of honor, Chapelle de l’Hôpital, Clermont Ferrand, France.
Exhibition, St James, Bordeaux Gallery, France.
Palindrome, exhibition with Florence Arnold, Yakin&Boaz Gallery, Casablanca, Morocco.
2012
Exhibition, Marie Vitoux Gallery, Paris, France.
Exhibition, Didier Bresson Gallery, Béziers, France.
Exhibition, Danielle Bourdette Gallery, Honfleur, France.
Exhibition, Le Soleil sur la plage Gallery, Lyon, France.
Exhibition, Le Clos des Cimaises Gallery, St Georges du Bois, France.

Lydie Arickx

Lydie Arickx is a painter and a sculptor who was born in 1954 in France from Flemish parents.

After graduating in 1978 from the École Supérieure d’Arts Graphiques de Paris (ESAG), she had her first solo exhibition of pastels and oil paintings in 1979 at Jean Briance Gallery. Since the beginning of the 1980s, she has participated in international events such as Art Basel, FIAC, and Art Paris. In 1988, she presented her work in Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and the United States with a group exhibition at Amaury Taittinger in New York in which her work was presented alongside pieces by Francis Bacon. In 1991, she moved to Landes and worked on large forms and pursued the creation of monumental sculptures. In 1999, for the 800th anniversary of the Jurade of Saint Émilion, Arickx presented a double personal exhibition in the cloister of the Monolithic Church. Arickx regularly organizes cultural events in theaters, such as the Art Sénat 2001, which meshes contemporary art and live performance, while also hosting creative workshops for schools and businesses.

Arickx’s pieces have been incorporated into major international public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Pompidou Center, Palais de Tokyo, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, as well as in public spaces such as the Paul-Brousse Hospital, the Intercommunal Hospital Center of Créteil, the IUFM of Mont-de-Marsan, the MACS Saint-Vincent-de-Tyronne, and a fresco for the commemoration of the centenary of the arenas of Dax in 2013. Arickx’s studio is a source for experimentation, where she likes to share with all audiences. 

In 2014, she published her first book, Nous vivons, with Diabase editions. In May 2015, Arickx filled the city of Roubaix with four large exhibitions that paid homage to her family roots, one of which was at the Piscine, a museum for art and industry, with a monumental fresco that measured up to 200 meters long. The following year, filled with experience from Roubaix, Arickx was invited by the Center of National Monuments to create two monumental performances with one exhibition in the room for the Gens d’armes at the Conciergerie in Paris and one installation at the Expiatory Chapel. In 2017, for her first collaboration with Loo & Lou, she exposed her work during the exhibition “Gravité,” which took over the gallery’s three spaces. In 2018, she participated the exhibition, Tant qu’il y aura des Ogres, which included more than 500 works around the theme of the fairytale. Later, in 2019, she exhibited work alongside Niki de Saint Phalle and other female artists for  « Créatrices – L’émancipation par l’art », which was held in the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes.

Her exhibition Arborescences was on view at the National Domain of Chambord, another architectural and historical gem, in 2021. Arickx used different themed rooms to transform the architecture of this historic monument with a transfigured vision of living beings. For more information, please click here.

ELISABETH DAYNÈS

Elisabeth Daynès was born in Beziers, France in 1960. She currently lives and works in Paris. In the early stages of her career in theater, she was fascinated by questions of identity and metamorphosis. From the 1990s, this passion led her to painstakingly recreate the bodies of prehistoric hominids, on which she had based the most advanced scientific knowledge. She thus became a world-renowned paleo artist, notably with her reconstructions of fossil hominids for the Museum of Tautavel or her recreation of the Australopithecus Lucy in 1999 for the Field Museum in Chicago. In 2010, she was awarded the John J. Lanzendorf PaleoArt Prize. In 2011, the Ile-de-France Museum of Prehistory devoted a solo exhibition to her work, while a number of her sculptures of hominids were inaugurated in South Korea. Through her work on origins, she invites us to the question the appearance and faces of humans, today and in the future. 

Today, the artist brings reflection about identity, the significance of the skull, and the face, from our origins, to today, until the future. Using a wide variety of formats, materials, and treatments as well as reimagining and recreating the skull’s patterns, she shows all the faces we could have had, and that we will have one day, if such is our desire as artists. The skull is at the beginning and the end of all things, framing the base of each one of our identities. It is the part where the skeleton is the most salient.

Her collection of flayed in relief underlines the aspects of a plural and abundant humanity. Insisting on the miraculous moment when the flesh covers the bones, magnifying the muscles of the face and expressions. She invites us to an extraordinary one on one with five characters searching for an identity.

Elisabeth Daynès also wants to show that at a time of social media and omnipresent imagery, anyone is hence free to invent an infinite amount of narcissistic mirrors: the border between the real and the virtual, the artificial and the natural is now blurred. Her art toys discontinuously with science because science plays a big role in our imaginary.  

In this day and age, physical appearance and the perpetual search for perfection has become an obsession. The idea of changing one’s nose or mouth for a professional meeting or a dinner among friends does not sound so far-fetched in today’s world where technology has taken over biological evolution. 

ARGHAËL

Arghaël became fascinated by the human body while working as a film director, capturing life through the prism of cameras and editing rooms. In searching for a more personal mode of expression, he turned to charcoal and canvas to explore raw human intimacy. He studied charcoal drawing with live models at the Beaux-Arts University in Paris to develop his skills. 

Arghaël’s work questions the mystery of the flesh, frontally probing the unconscious and ultimately giving birth on canvas with the stroke of his hand. His charcoal drawings capture flesh and bone in their bare essence. Drawing his men and women on the walls of what he calls his “mental cave,” or the canvas laying before his eyes like a second skin. 

At times, his oversized subjects and their evanescent faces seem to be floating in space, evoking a kind of newfound freedom. Arghaël’s creatures rise to life before us and become metaphors for his creative process. His graphic approach, similar to compositing, allows telluric flashes that are amplified by warm pastels and oil paints. Arghaël uses charcoal to capture flesh in a primitive expression and gives in-temporal elegance to his larger-than-life creations. In 2016, Loo & Lou Gallery exhibited his very first solo show.

©Tanc

TANC

Tanc was born in 1979 in Paris, where he currently lives and works. 

What characterizes him is the uniqueness of his style, which becomes more easily understandable when we learn that Tanc grew up with graffiti. He believes that street art is ephemeral and that the action can be more important than the result. For him “to be an artist is a way of life”, therefore there must be total investment and absolute integrity. At the beginning of the 2000s, he focused on studio work and immediately distinguished himself from traditional graffiti artists through his work based on the line, researching synthesis. First using his name, then tags in general, then people, music, and finally, his favorite subject: life.

Essentially based on the line, his work is not aiming to be perfect, but spontaneous. The state he is in defines his density and rigor. His heartbeat activates his arm like a metronome, though he doesn’t try to control this flow but just to understand the composition that he makes appear in balance between the conscious and unconscious. He composes his music and his paintings in a similar way.

He is dense or light, rigorous or unstructured, but Tanc does not play; he lives his art. He signs his paintings with “Tanc” as he has signed walls with tags since his teenage hood. This discipline is first and foremost an instinctive outlet of his need for expression: he reappropriates himself urban spaces by shouting his name to the city with force.

Soon, the letters disappear and Tanc engages in exploring abstraction. By concentrating his work on lines and colors, he renews the classical pictorial research by confronting it with the primary vivacity of street art: preponderance of action, perfection of gesture, acceptance of chance and expression of a strong singularity. Above all, his works strikes with their intensity, their musicality, and the vibration of lights and materials. The action, energy, and emotion of the artist touches the spectator in a sensual, intimate, and immediate way.

Tanc has numerous group and solo exhibitions, notably in Germany (Skatlizers Contemporary Art), New York (Catherine Ahnell Gallery), England (The French Art Studio) and Morocco (David Bloch Gallery). He also participated in the Mois de la Francophonie at the French Institute of Beirut in 2013.

Though it may seem subjective, could you describe your path?

It started during my childhood when I discovered painting through different ways… One of them spoke to me, it was graffiti, and I decided to work with it. I started by painting abstract shapes, lines, colors, and effects… until I earned my place in the milieu by writing my name.

During the 2000’s, I started to have shows, along with the newly found passion of public for Street Art. I had recently graduated with a master’s degree in artistic direction, and I had to make a choice between living by reason or living my dreams… I chose my dreams. After meeting Jean Faucheur and the group focused on poster collages Une nuit, I gathered my VAO friends to invest a workshop at la forge in Belleville. Exhibitions followed at a regular pace, with first trips, residencies… I didn’t earn much money, but it seemed so easily earned in the face of the life I lead. I painted and I partied, everywhere and all the time. I wanted to live it all! Seven years have gone by, and I left with Atlas in a new workshop in the Lilas. It was a new era. I became braver, more serious, and more professional. The dream came true, I had to consider new goals. It was six years ago. Nowadays, I follow my path in the art world through exhibitions and encounters. It’s funny how the closer I get to my goal, the longer the road seems to be. Life is a performance!

Your work shows a peculiar interest for gesture, what influences are hidden behind this interest?

Even though my heart belongs to several types of artistic representations, I feel closer to Action painting and lyric abstraction. In my opinion, the emotion that its practice provokes has no equal. Within it, gesture prevails and is singular. It is, even in a well-established scheme, the human touch, painter’s transmission to the viewer through the ages. Eternally frozen instants. It’s this intimacy I crave in the gesture.

For you, action mostly prevails on result, at which step of your creation do you chose to focus on one or another?

Action prevailing on result became a philosophy to me. It’s the beginning of my production. I think that too much knowledge and reflecting on Art history and too much thinking to find a new concept to get along the institutional art in France (contemporary art) parts in a reflection that is rarely constructive. I am a conceptual painter, but the relationship to material is primary to me. I do not agree that the idea is enough to be an artist and that production is solely craftsmanship. Action is concrete. It does not play, crumbles dreams and brings maturity. 

Result is determined more like an adequacy between the idea I have of the used tool and its final production. I will still find enjoyment during the action in finding little hazards that will give the result’s prestige. Furthermore, it will be praised and hated, sometimes by the same people at the same time. The “beautiful” being bygone in contemporary art, tastes evolve through concepts and processes. Mine being to privilege unconscious in my creation. I prefer to think to the result before and after the action. 

First lettering, you then went towards more abstraction, was it the logical follow-up of your approach?

My research, since I’ve been working in studio, goes towards abstraction, I find more emotion. In the street, it’s different. Letters impact has another meaning. But boarders remain blurry for me. When does a letter become an abstract form? This is where I play to find limits by integrating new inspirations from my travels. Going back on my traits, scraping the canvas, creating volume, deepness and pictural vibrance. 

It is important to remember that my approach is to paint with my unconscious expressing itself. Kind of a state between trance and meditation, like a therapy to me (a bit like Sam Francis sometimes ago).

The more I give up to spontaneity, the more I let myself go, the more well-executed the painting will be (beautiful). Self-confidence is key. Like the calligrapher, I repeated my gesture, I must be sure, not think. Only appreciate hazards of the shapes appearing. 

Does experience influences your work? how does it feed your creation and reflects in your works?

Experience influences my work through my being, intellectually today, physically tomorrow. I think about Hans Hartung that I love. Self-confidence comes with time. Sensations brought to me by life often had impacts on my painting. I think again of breaks up that were interesting and useful in a pictural point of view. I like my painting to reflect my life. My Variations serve is the perfect example. One trait with a single gesture summarizes my emotional state by filling the canvas. Like an electrocardiogram of the lived moment during the action. 

Which artists have been of major importance to you in your artistic research or caught your eye recently?

I started to want to paint by discovering graffiti and artists like Dondi and Futura 200. Then, I got interested into Art History and Abstract Expressionism and New York School. From Franz Kline’s action painting to Mark Rothko’s fulness. It was done, my art would come out of these two movements. Following this, artists like Bernard Frise, Simon Hentaï, Henri Michaux or Christopher Wool inspired me. For the past 4 years, I’m also fond of Korean painting, Dansaekhwa with artists such as Park Seobo, Chung Chang Sup, Lee Seung Jim, Lee Bae…

I also have an eye on the future and follow a lot what my generation does. Artists like KR, Pablo Tomec, Erosi, Revok. There’s so many of them…

We often talk about your synthesis; can you tell us more about it?

I started working on tags synthesis, or rather their energy. I wanted to transcript without reproducing canvas already done in the 80’s.

Through this, I realized that I could synthesis lights, emotions, frequencies surrounding me with traits and colors. 
Synthesis pushed me towards minimalism, then towards maximalism (reproduction of the same pattern on a whole format).

Do you think that collaboration between artists plays an important role in your practice? (You share your studio with Atlas, but also in the world of street art, crew, etc.)

Collaboration between artists is important on a morality pov. We often feel isolated, tormented to know if our art is raising and will raise enough enthusiasm for it to be conserved and restored. In this way, it is necessary to discuss on our thoughts and to celebrate our successes. Being recognized by our equals and colleagues is more important to me than a few sold paintings. 

About creating artworks with others, I am quite skeptical…Except for some projects with Steph Cop for the 2016 Marrakech Biennial or Atlas with whom we share our reviews to create four-handed paintings. It is often difficult to share instead of competition. Artists have strong egos, it’s not always easy to deal with…

You are often linked with the Graffuturism movement, do you think you belong to it?

I really don’t consider myself in any movement, future will do its thing…

I believed in the beginning in Graffuturism because I thought that Street Art (that is originally a 20-persons group in the world) had become a niche where we put everything and anything.

Unfortunately, it quickly became the same. Basically, these movements which come from artists stemming from the graffiti having had a reflection to lead on a new form of art are polluted every time by pushy artists. No background.

Do you set limits for yourself in the use of mediums? 

I have only their mastery as limits. 
As an autodidact, I tested a lot of things. Often with success, sometimes with failures, often with time. That lead me to their utility. Nowadays, I still do research but do not hesitate to call a specialist to learn. It is important to know our abilities. Use’s orientation of a tool and the importance of being assisted or not. I started to paint with spray cans 20 years ago et it remains, by far, my tool of choice. It is an extension of me. Painting without touching the medium, it’s an unmatched feeling for me. 

How do you see the institutionalization of artistic practices (or yours even more) in urban field?

I am in favor of artistic practices recognition by institutions, museums as much as in the public space. But I am also a defender of wild action, often illegal ones. The risks taken and the speed of execution give a more romantic touch, to my liking. You do not forget that I privilege action over result. In cities, people need to evade, art is a really good way to do so. I think of the happiness I have to walk past graffities since I’m a child. It changed my life.
Institutions follow today with the Art market. With the speculative rise provoked by Street art, we expect to see a lot more of it. It was already showed in the Grand Palais, at the Palais de Tokyo and at the Pompidou Center…

It’s the path of every practice and every artist. Then, it’s all cycles. There will always be young people who will emerge and break all the established boarders for art not to be institutional. Art is generational, everybody has theirs. 

The idea of the vandal spraying a tag, is it still the case, or is it more of an imaginary attached to this practice? 

You can’t cheat with paint and even less with tag. It’s easy to know who does what, you just have to get out on the street. So, no! There is nothing imaginary. I’m far from being an addict than some people or even younger people. Illegally writing your name brought me where I am, and I want to remain sincere with my approach (I’m not talking about the pleasure I have from doing it).

Truth is that it brings a strength to my studio work that I lose if I don’t come back.

You are also a musician, does all of this it has a common point in your creation, or can you tell us more about it?

I was always mesmerized by music! It’s the easiest art to appreciate, no need to intellectualize. We can feel it physically. Everybody will give you an opinion on a piece or on a musical genre…But, playing as an autodidact is quite difficult. I had to find the right instruments to practice by myself. During the early 2000’s, music was mainly produced by computer. Weary of having worked with it too much during graphism studies, I look for different options in the Pigalle music shops. I decided to buy a first machine (sequencer, drum machine, synthesizer). I am fascinated to work on live music. To feel the electricity becoming frequency, ripple, note…Without knowing it, this research is influencing my painting in my search for abstraction and completing my character. I will then not stop to work simultaneously on both subjects. I often say that my arm is actioned by my heart like a huge metronome transcribing my emotions. I paint my internal music.

What are your ongoing projects or collaborations, exhibitions, new works to come?

I am still working on several series of paintings, some will be visible soon, some others in a few years.

To see some, it is currently at the Loo & Lou Gallery in Paris, then starting from the 18^th of January with Atlas at the COX Gallery in Bordeaux. In February, at the Brugier Rigail Gallery for a collective exhibition and during spring in Germany for the Urban art Biennial.
For collaborations, the Olivade fabrics will drop three patterns of my creation and I have ongoing projects of parquet and carpet editions.
Several books, lithographs and serigraphs are also ongoing.

Do you have a place where you would like to exhibit/ work?

I feel really close to Asia even though I already exhibited and worked there, I think it is where my heart would guide me currently. Otherwise, New York and Paris remain the best places to catch up with trends and to try to insert yourself in the artistic world.

What is art for you (starting with: “to me, art is…)?

To me, art is the possibility to transform actions and materials in reflection. To question and federate people on the world that surrounds us. Art is a religion nowadays, and big shows are masses where everybody rushes to, looking for answers and mysticism.

But to me who’s in the action, it’s above all a balance and a therapy. My reason to live.

ANNA DE LEIDI

Anna De Leidi lives and works in Udine, Italy.

As a teenager her interest focused mostly towards modern art and art history. So she decides to pursue a degree in art history. During her studies she develops a passion for collage art, 20th century avantgardists and Neo-avant-gardists, whom she admires, identifing herself with their defiant political attitude and their anti-establishment manners and techniques.

After graduating with a dissertation on the Moma 1961 Exhibition “The Art of Assemblage”, she leaves Turin, where she was living, to travel outside of Italy. Europe at the time felt stuffy and saturated with too much known history, so she decides to move very far, in search of a completely different scenario. She spends eight years in Australia, where she becomes independent and learns new skills that were lacking in her studies; she picks the culinary field and worked in cheffing, moving further away from my previous experience and immersing herself in another culture to fully be part of it.

When Covid-19 hit Australia and bans were put in place, De Leidi finds myself forced at home, browsing through books and magazines and spontaneously starts cutting and pasting to create collages. It became a fundamental daily practice. She then uses Instagram as a medium to meet and gather around a virtual community of collage artists and put up her own gallery, “Coll_usional”, discovering new ways of connecting through art at a time of anguishing isolation.

Through 2020, making collages enabled her to express and rediscover parts of her identity that were left dormant for some years and fuelled both a personal and artistic growth that eventually led her to decide to move back to Italy.

The creative process is quite simple and usually begins with a gut feeling: the instinctual selection of an image, often a human figure, and grows by associating shapes and colours to that core image, often in relation to music lyrics or other sentences that keep bouncing around her head as she cuts and pastes, and become an obsession. The outcome of the composition is not really predetermined, but it unfolds and finds it flow as she goes along. Through a particular scene, which often has some levels of personal references, she always tries to convey the sense of the universal meaning of human experiences.

Since her return to Italy, Anna De Leidi has mainly focused on grassroot activism and d.i.y. practices. She has contributed to various collage magazines, both printed and online and co-founded a collage collective called Arto. Her major artistic achievement so far has been having her works being exhibited in a group show called “A Visual Culture” (March 24, 2021 — April 4, 2021) at Van Der Plas Gallery, N.Y.

© Dominique Lacloche

Dominique Lacloche

Dominique Lacloche was born in 1960 in Rome. She currently lives and works between Paris and London.

Lacloche’s practice consists of printing silver gelatin photographic images onto giant Gunnera Manicata leaves. The leaves of this South American plant are distinctive for their disproportionate sizes, measuring up to 2 or 3 meters across, making the plant extremely precarious to handle.

This unique plant and photographic technique converge by virtue of light – the unpredictable nature of organic and chemical “life” plays out in her work through photosynthesis and photographic revelation. The image passes through delicate, unpredictable phases and her artistic gestures yield to the force of external events that impose themselves like natural laws.

The size of the leaves accentuates the subject of the image and transports the viewer to a world where the monumental dictates its own laws. The leaves become a support for an image, part of an installation, or a pretext for other image manipulations with the negatives or through superimpositions, for example. The spatial arrangement and clarity of these giant leaves create a challenge for the artist to strike the right balance.

The images revealed on the leaves are typically landscapes reflected in water. At this scale, the landscapes are all-encompassing and poetic; they absorb the viewer in their reflections. The images become fleeting landscapes of emotion, due to the salience of the work’s spatial disposition and the material on which the images are printed. However, like apparitions hovering between the infinitely elusive and the infinitely intimate, what is communicated either faintly or clearly through the veins of the leaves is akin to visions of “another world” that could be strangely familiar to the viewer.

Lacloche’s artistic work is enhanced by her visions while painting and of architecture, two disciplines that she has studied and practiced for many years. Equally interested in evolutionary and organic temporal systems, Lacloche has additionally explored these themes through film, digital animation, sound design, and electroacoustic music composition.

Lacloche’s works are present in several private collections around the world.

Paul de Pignol

Paul de Pignol was born in Toulouse in 1965. He currently lives and works between Paris and Montigny-sur-Loing.

In 1984, he entered the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, where he worked in Pierre Carron’s painting studio. He created his first sculpture, inspired by the Venus of Lucas Cranach, entitled “Fille au Ballon” in 1989. Little by little, sculpting was integrated into his practice.

In 2010, de Pignol decided to dedicate a specific workshop to drawing in Paris, establishing a link between the two disciplines a short time afterwards. Whether sculpting or drawing, de Pignol plunges into an intimate essence of the being. He focuses his work on feminine figures, linking them with universal themes of birth, life, and death. Throughout his study of the female figure, he began questioning its function, weight, and composition, as well as its deconstruction and presence both of the interior and exterior.

De Pignol’s paintings are an extension of his work and research as a sculptor. His gestures are similar, wherein he erases matter in order to add light, stroke by stroke, giving his unravelling bodies a spectral presence.

Since 2017, after years of failure, rejection, and wandering, de Pignol found pictorial language relative to his research. One of his recent exhibitions at Loo & Lou Gallery, Né du limon, is the result of this quest. With a fascination for landscapes, the artist is inspired by the Fontainebleau forest that surrounds his studio. The idea that any life can be birthed from decay fascinates him, and inspires him to create organic and living landscapes, where you can feel the turf and soil. We are close to Golem. This exhibition reunited for the first time drawings, sculptures, and canvases, in what represented for the artist a joyous and fertile renewal, thanks to both the subject matter and the use of multiple medias.

JEAN-CLAUDE WOUTERS

Jean Claude Wouters (b. 1956) is a Belgian artist who has lived and worked in Brussels, Paris, Tokyo, Italy, Dubai and Los Angeles. He studied drawing from an early age, and moved on to ballet, filmmaking and various performing arts.

Wouters shows an intense sensitivity to the nature of both the body and spirit. He works with three analog cameras: a 135, a polaroid, and a medium format 67, and uses 6×7 negatives in order to avoid photographic grain on his images. He asks his subjects to face a window, employing only natural light to illuminate them. After developing and printing this original image, he rephotographs it and uses strong light from the sky that reflects into his lens’ aperture. He repeats this process several times in order to layer it with light, which gradually erase the appearance of the person. The final negative is printed in the darkroom on 80 x 100 cm matte Baryta paper, a unique copy which is then treated using selenium for preservation purposes, a method similar to one used to preserve photographs taken in the 19th century. This negative used is then dipped in sand and placed into a small wooden box which accompanies the portrait.

In his earlier career, after studying and dancing with Maurice Béjart and Lindsay Kemp in the early eighties, Wouters began working as a performing artist and as an independent filmmaker. His films were selected by the British Film Institute, the Tsukuba University Japan, the Director Fortnight section (Quinzaine des réalisateurs) at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981 (Brian Eno – Music for Films), and he has received several awards in international film festivals, in New York, San Francisco, Paris, Praha, Teheran and Montreal. He worked for years in Paris as a filmmaker and fashion photographer, his speciality being a simple and natural expression of the beauty of women

He has worked with Lancôme, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent and several luxury brands.), and has also collaborated with fashion designer Marc Jacobs for ARTREAGEOUS at Bloomingdale’s (New York, 2007). In 2011, he performed CRINOLINE MAN at the LACMA museum (Los Angeles), and SHADOW WALKER at the MOCA museum (Tucson, AZ). In 2012, he was awarded the POLLOCK-KRASNER Foundation Grant in NYC.

AURÉLIA JAUBERT

From her first paintings composed of coloured mortars incorporating collages of her own photographs to her recent tapestries, Aurélia Jaubert has been fascinated by the metamorphosis of images, their passage from one medium to another, and the illusions they engender. She has gradually left the traditional surface of painting for heterogeneous compositions; a kind of utopian mixture to reflect the historical crises of representation. She favours mixing and diversion: painting, textiles, photography, digital images, collage, sewing, sculpture, sound and music, and light. To ennoble the remains, to be interested in the slightest of nature (reflections, bubbles, shadows, traces…) and reinsert them into a cycle of metamorphoses that erase the metamorphoses that erase the value of use and reinstate an unexpected aesthetic value.
These are as much the gestures of a collector as those of an artist who always remains faithful to the image.

Dreaming about the fantastic destiny of small accidents or objects of everyday life, smudges stains, drips, coloured debris, decommissioned magnetic tapes, old swimming pool buoys, fabric samples… So many modern ruins from which Jaubert, herbalist of the asphalt, attempts to reinvent through elegant, surprising, bizarre and unprecedented imagery.

-Dominique Païni, critic and independent curator, Director of the Centre Pompidou (2000-2005), Director of the Cinémathèque française (1990-2000)

Selected group exhibitions:
2022 La Ronde, Museum of Antiquities and Museum of Education, Rouen
My journey through tapestries from 1520 to 2020, Galerie Jabert, Aubusson
2021 L’Assemblage, une pratique médiumnique, Le 19 – Centre régional d’art contemporain, Montbéliard
TAMAT Museum, Tournai, Belgium
Museum of Art and Industry, La Piscine, Roubaix

Selected solo exhibitions:
2021 Faire tapisserie, Musée La Manufacture, Roubaix
Glaneuse, Stéphane Mortier Gallery, Paris
2019 3ème âge (le retour d’ Ulysse), Atelier d’Alexandra Roussopoulos, Paris
2018 Lost in Hardiskland, Kamila Regent Gallery, Saignon
Flux & Remix, Togu art club, Marseille

FRED KLEINBERG

Fred Kleinberg was born in 1966 in Paris, France, where he currently lives and works. He graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and has been exhibiting his work internationaly since 1983. His pieces are a part of numerous private collections and have been shown in galleries and public institutions. Kleinberg conceives his work as successive thematic projects ans intuitively creates new bodies of work that are inspired by his travels around the world.

Kleinberg is a globe-trotting artist who has been selected for a number of artist residencies, such as the Villa Medicis in Rome in 1996 in collaboration with the novelist Kits Hilaire, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow in 2001, the Art Residency of Pondichéry in 2004 in India, in China in 2010 in collaboration with the Hong Merchant Gallery of Shanghai, and in India in 2018 at the University of Shantiniketan.

He has received several paintings awards: the Salon de Montrouge prize in 1998, the Coprim foundation prize in 2000, the Taylor foundation prize in 2008, the Charles Oulmont fondation prize in 2008 and the 1st contemporary art prize of Monaco in 2014.

His most notable exhibitions include : La mémoire au corps at the Coprim foundation in Paris in 1999 ; D’obscénité et de fureur at the Passage de Retz in Paris in 2002 ; Made in India at the Koehnline Museum of Art in Chicago, USA in 2006 ; Baroque Flesh at the Polad-Hardouin Gallery in Paris in 2011 ; Territoire d’héroïsme et de fureur, his first retrospective exhibition, at the Messine Gallery in Paris in 2012 ; Reborn Project at the Frank Pages Gallery in Geneva, Switzerland in 2015 ; Odyssey at the ART Elysées fair in Paris as guest of honor in 2017.

Composition II, 2021, Ceramic diptych, L 95 x I 61 cm (each) © Louise Frydman

LOUISE FRYDMAN

CATHERINE WILKENING

“One day in 2002, during my career as an actress, the need to put my hands in matter imposed itself on me; the earth became vital to me at once. I launched into sculpture with a primal, animal instinct, guided by a deep and irreproachable impulse. My exploration is underground and organic, my work is physical, sensual, enjoyable. There is no conceptual plan, I let go of what is in my head and become one with living matter. I take a leap into the void.

My work has always been nourished by the feminine figure, with obsessive themes – birth, chaos, death, rebirth, impermanence, devotion, cannibalism – subjects that I explored through porcelain sculptures in 2019 during Art Paris at the Grand Palais with Loo & Lou Gallery. Today, going through these long periods of confinement in an anxiety-provoking climate, I feel the need to connect to the luminous, the spiritual, the elevated, the transcendental… to work on repetition, the multiple, the swarming, the infinite, the infinitely monumental in the infinitely tiny, like mantras that soothe and numb cerebral agitation, like broad breaths – to build from chaos, from fragments of aborted or abandoned sculptures, and give them a new breath of life… These long months of gestation birthed immense, immaculate, porcelain Madonnas, adorned with gold, Murano glass, crowned with roses, thorns, roots.”

– Catherine Wilkening

Être en Nature, 2020, Greek white marble, 53 x 41 x 18,5 cm / Photo: Alberto Ricci © Benoît Luyckx

BENOÎT LUYCKX

Decoration of the Youth, charcoal, pastel, ink and oil on Belgian linen canvas, 200×250 cm, 2019, ©Andile Buka

NELSON MAKAMO

Nelson Makamo is an artist based in Johannesburg. He was born in 1982 in a town called Modimolle, in South Africa’s Limpopo province. Gifted with an astounding artistic aptitude in drawing and painting, Makamo honed his craft at Artist Proof Studios in Johannesburg, where he studied printmaking for 3 years.

Makamo has exhibited his work in group and solo exhibitions in South Africa, Europe, England and the US. He has shown in group shows alongside other South African artists, including David Koloane, Colbert Mashile, Deborah Bell, and William Kentridge.

Nelson’s work is strongly influenced by the candid innocence of children, particularly those in rural South Africa. He believes that they embody the peace and harmony that we all strive for in life. For him, the joy and simplicity in which children perceive life and human interactions still resides in each and everyone of us. Thus, he hopes to help the viewer relive these forgotten notions.

Makamo’s work is included in many collections such as those of fashion icon Giorgio Armani, musician Annie Lennox, Hanzehof Zutphense Kunst Collectis, DJ Black Coffee, Swizz Beatz, Oprah Winfrey, Ava Duvernay, to name a few.

His most recent achievement is one of his artwork gracing TIME magazine’s cover  for their Special Edition on optimism, which was guest edited by acclaimed film director Ava Duvernay.

EXHIBITIONS

2018
FNB Joburg art fair, Stand Ll Editions, Johannesburg, South-Africa.
The Re-awakening, CIRCA Gallery, Le Cap, South-Africa.
1:54, exposition collective, Stand GAFRA Gallery, Londres, England.
2017
1:54, Stand GAFRA Gallery, Londres, England.
No Commission, Dean Collection, Berlin, Germany.
We are the souls of Azania, GAFRA Gallery, Londres, England.
Salon Zurcher Africa Art Fair, exposition collective, Zurcher Gallery, New York, United-States.
DDESSIN17, foire de dessin contemporain, exposition collective, Atelier Richelieu, Paris, France.
Fuir, exposition collective, Fondation Blachère, Apt, France.
Résidence, Fondation Blachère, Apt, France.
2016
Dipôlelo, Galerie Fatiha Selam, sous le commissariat Anna Reverdy, Paris, France.
Post It, exposition collective, Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, South-Africa.
Résidence, SAFFCA Fondation, Saint-Émilion, France.
2015
1:54, exposition collective, Stand CIRCA Gallery, Londres, England.
2014
Everard Read, Le Cap, South-Africa.
Everard Read, Johannesburg, South-Africa.
FNB Joburg art fair, exposition collective, Stand Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg, South-Africa.
Winter, exposition collective, Everard Read Gallery, Le Cap, South-Africa.
2013
Salon 91, Le Cap, South-Africa.
2012
Figuring differences, exposition collective, Andrew Lamprecht commissaire d’exposition, salon 91, Le Cap, South-Africa.
Les 21 ans de Artist Proof Studio, exposition collective, Johannesburg Art Gallery, South-Africa.
2011
Museum of Africa, Johannesburg, South-Africa.
2010
Young Contemporaries, exposition collective, Galleria Nikki Diana Marquardt, Paris, France.
2009
Sharing Realities II, African Studies Centre, Leiden, Netherland.
Walking with Me, UTS Gallery, Edinburg, Scotland.
A Place I Call Home, Gallery on the Square, Johannesburg, South-Africa.
City Link, exposition collective, Gallery 23, Amsterdam, Netherland.
Gallery on the Square, exposition collective, Sandton, Johannesburg, South-Africa.
2008
Moving into Light, KZNSA Gallery, Durban, South-Africa.
Sharing Realities, Gallery Izarte, Zutphen, Netherland.
2007
Cultural and Business Art Exhibition, exposition collective, Somma Lombardo, Italy.
Making Identity, exposition collective, The Thompson Gallery, Johannesburg, South-Africa.
2006
Ten Years of Printmaking, exposition collective, David Krut Print Studios, Johannesburg, South-Africa.
2005
Walk with me, Obert Contemporary Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South-Africa.