Pierre-Luc Poujol
“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.
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.
“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 by Cahiers Dessinés.
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)
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
We are pleased to announce our participation in the 2023 edition of the contemporary art fair JUSTMAD in Madrid.
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.
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
“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 by Cahiers Dessinés.
We are pleased to announce our participation in the 2022 edition of the contemporary art fair JUSTLX in Lisboa.
For over fifteen years, Catherine Wilkening has concentrated on universal themes that surround the female figure – birth, life, death, and rebirth. Now, her work collides with the figure of the Madonna, one of the most canonical forms in Western art. Wilkening avoids both the image of the divine and the melancholic beauty that encompasses the ideal Christian Virgin, including a contemporary and provocative kitsch approach. Instead, she proposes a series of sculptures that evoke restlessness and agitation, in the image of some other beauty. An intense wind blows on the Madonnas by Wilkening that fold the porcelain garments with a baroque gesture that appears to continue infinitely. Sometimes the sculptor creates her Madonnas ex nihilo from an erection of porcelain that she miraculously assembles
At other times, the artist appropriates vintage sculptures dedicated to the celebration of the Virgin Mary that she diverts from their ecumenical representation to reintegrate them into her mystical and baroque universe. Wilkening is looking for «the monumental in the minuscule.» She conquers the grandeur of her works by exploring all the possibilities of the miniature, enveloping the infinitely large in the infinitely small. Moreover, Wilkening’s sculptures cannot be deciphered through a quick glance. It is necessary to look at them for a long time to reach the meaning of their forms. The exquisite obsessions of the artist are hidden from our eyes in a maze of extreme finesse of the porcelain. Under the apparent softness and consistency of white enamel, the chastity of the Madonnas quickly crumble and reveal scarifications cracking the skin of the ceramic, the abundance of floral patterns, animal bones and accumulations of small rear-ends, expression of a generosity of life that takes on all the reigns of creation. The artist’s use of new materials such as gold leaf, Murano glass or acacia wood helps to thwart summary recognitions. The eye hesitates between the aerial, vegetal, and animalistic elements.
Through the infinite exploration of minute detail, Wilkening evokes certain spiritualist artists that obsessively operate as miniaturists on immense formats, folding and unfolding their composition as they advance, practicing a form of automatism. The sculptures are sometimes worked for hundreds of hours, showing a certain asceticism from the artist. Hence the mantric and hallucinatory dimension of some of these pieces born in the isolation of confinement. The sculptor made this constraint her own as the expression of a happy and protective solitary retreat where she was able to concentrate and intensify her practice. — Philippe Godin, art critic
Aurélie Deguest was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine to a German mother and a French father, both students at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. She grew up in a rich, stimulating artistic and cultural environment. Painting imposed itself on her at a very young age, structuring her career path and pushing her to attend evening classes at the Beaux-Arts university in Paris at the age of sixteen. She went on to earn a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts at Paris VIII in 1989. Afterwards, she embarked on an independent career that allowed her to continue to learn while facing ever more rewarding challenges. She works in the event industry and on important projects led by film studios. Deguest is a copyist of classical painting where her demand for fidelity has her spending hours on the same details. As a decorator, she stages the sets she designs and creates. Parallel to this, she continues to produce personal work that reflects her experiences and long-term research. She has reached a technical maturity through the mastery of drawing, color, material and light. In her last solo exhibition Faces at Loo & Lou Gallery in 2015, Deguest explored a powerful and bloodless expressionist figurative style through ten portraits that she painted in acrylic and oil. Far from any physical resemblance, she focuses on a carnal and provocative representation that challenges the gaze, intimidates, and seduces. Since then, without ever moving away from her painting, the artist has devoted herself fully to other personal projects. Today she offers us a series of large format portraits entitled “Women in prayer”. A theme that imposed itself upon the artist after much working introspectively, like many other artists, during the period of Covid pandemic. She felt the need during this time to reconnect with a form of spirituality. These latest works will come into dialogue with Catherine Wilkening’s spectacular porcelain Madonnas.
Loo & Lou Gallery has the immense pleasure to announce our participation in the contemporary art fair JUSTMAD for our fifth year in a row.
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, 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 as her artistic gestures are born from her journeys. In 2016, she participated in the Biennale de Marrakech, during which she exhibited for the first time her waterproof paper on coated brass installations 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 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.
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.
Loo & Lou Gallery has the immense pleasure to announce our participation in the contemporary art fair ZⓈONAMACO Foto for the first time.
Our proposal revolves around the universe of the belgian artist, 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.
Hélène Damville, Paul de Pignol, Olivier de Sagazan, and Cedric le Corf
Loo & Lou Gallery has the immense pleasure to announce our participation in the contemporary art fair JUSTMAD for the fourth year in a row.
Our proposal revolves around the universe of four French artists, who are painters, engravers, illustrators, and sculptors. This proposal honors the theme of the landscape as well as living matter, both animal and vegetal.
Born into a family of artists in Normandy, Hélène Damville has been practicing drawings inspired by nature since her youth. This passion for the observation of life (both fauna and flora) led her to explore the Natural History Museum of Paris where she discovered Buffon and the naturalists. Copying works by her teachers, she familiarized herself with the complexity of skeletons and their articulations, as well as the networks and ramifications of the plant world. These dry elements represent life’s architecture as well as the traces left by passed lives. Parallel to her assiduous visits to museums, she completed her studies by following artistic anatomy classes and graduating with a Masters in Oriental Philosophy from the Sorbonne. In this environment of scientific, philosophic, and artistic analysis, she built up her portfolio of etchings. The desire to be close to living matter pushed her to choose engraving as the main media in her research; Engraving, but more specifically directly carving on metal and wood. Through lines and vigorous strokes, the artist is able to translate the essence of life in her work. She was trained with a copper chisel by André Bongibault at the studio L’Estampe de Chaville, then later perfects ornamental engraving on metal at l’École Boulle. In her pieces, humans are rarely directly represented.
From engraving to tattooing
We find a natural extension in Damville’s pieces from working lines in the wood to the ancient art of tattooing. She is currently an apprentice in the Parisian tattoo salon belonging to Alessio Pariggiano. Since she loves working with organic material, Damville found the artistic niche she has been looking for.
From 2014 to 2015, she was an artist member of the French Academy in Madrid, Casa de Velazquez. In 2017, she won the Jean Asselbergs Prize, Taylor Foundation.
Paul de Pignol was born in Toulouse in 1965. He currently lives and works in Paris. 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.
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.
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. His work is included in numerous private collections (Yvon Lambert collection).
For the 2020 edition of Art Paris, Loo & Lou Gallery is offering a glance of the French scene faithful to its
artistic program, with four artists: Pierre-Édouard, Cédric Le Corf, Hélène Damville and Paul de Pignol.
Though their practices are different, from paintings and drawings to sculptures and etchings, these
artists from different generations, with French origin or residing within the hexagon, create work
inspired by landscapes and have a certain fascination for the living.
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.
Private collection (Lambert collection)
Cedric Le Corf is represented by Loo and Lou Gallery, Paris
Born into a family of artists in Normandy, Hélène Damville has been practicing drawings inspired by nature since her youth.This passion for the observation of life (both fauna and flora) led her to explore the Natural History Museum of Paris where
she discovered Buffon and the naturalists. Copying works by her teachers, she familiarized herself with the complexity of skeletons and their articulations, as well as the networks and ramifications of the plant world. These dry elements represent life’s architecture as well as the traces left by passed lives. Parallel to her assiduous visits to museums, she completed her studies by following artistic anatomy classes and graduating with a Masters in Oriental Philosophy from the Sorbonne. In this environment of scientific, philosophic, and artistic analysis, she built up her portfolio of etchings.
The desire to be close to living matter pushed her to choose engraving as the main media in her research; Engraving, but more specifically directly carving on metal and wood. Through lines and vigorous strokes, the artist is able to translate the essence of life in her work. She was trained with a copper chisel by André Bongibault at the studio L’Estampe de Chaville, then later perfects ornamental engraving on metal at l’École Boulle. In her pieces, humans are rarely directly represented.
From engraving to tattooing
We find a natural extension in Damville’s pieces from working lines in the wood to the ancient art of tattooing. She is currently an apprentice in the Parisian tattoo salon belonging to Alessio Pariggiano. Since she loves working with organic material, Damville found the artistic niche she has been looking for.
– Pascal Hemery
From 2014 to 2015, she was an artist member of the French Academy in Madrid, Casa de Velazquez.
In 2017, she won the Jean Asselbergs Prize, Taylor Foundation.
Pierre-Edouard was born in 1959.
His first series of drawings was created in the early 1980s and was shown by Claude Bernard in Paris. It is the series of “men on the ground”. A vision which apprehends all forms from the angle of an uninterrupted modelling, using the almost musical shadow. Then came the paintings shown by Claude Bernard in 1989, a development of the theme of “men on the ground” and “characters to scale”. Here we see a kind of deconstruction of the figure – the image is now incomplete. At the beginning of the 1990s, he tackled the theme of women in weightlessness in a series of sculptures that were shown in 1994. This theme of the body in horizontality and weightlessness will literally devour his work.
In 2004, he was awarded the 1st Prize of the Prince Pierre de Monaco Foundation and an exhibition followed the following year in the Principality. In 2010, he was elected member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France.
He collaborates with the Gallery ” Ditesheim & Mafféï fine Arts ” (Switzerland) (www.galerieditesheim.ch/galerie/) which will hold an exhibition in 2011 and shows him regularly in fairs and exhibitions.
In 2009 he returned to painting. The works are parallel to the sculptures, but the formats are getting bigger. Pierre-Edouard ventures into a new space. Despite the non-figurative essence of these works, he continues to explore the theme of a body in suspense. A human body that resembles a gigantic sperm whale.
Pierre-Edouard’s work as a whole is an articulation of the planes of space in a modulation without beginning or end. It is a work in suspense that questions the monumentality of form.
In 2013, he published the book “Baleines et Déesses” (Whales and Goddesses) with Editions William Blake and Co. A monograph of his engraved work, for which he wrote the text.
His works are in private collections in France, Switzerland, Belgium and the United States.
The Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection (www.ld-collection.org/ ) has a large number of drawings, paintings and sculptures.
Paul de Pignol was born in Toulouse in 1965. He currently lives and works in Paris, France.
In 1984, he entered the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, where he worked in the studio of the painter, Pierre Carron. He created his first sculpture, inspired by the Venus of Lucas Cranach, entitled “Fille au Ballon” in 1989. Little by little, sculpture became integrated into his practice.
In in addition to the studio in Montigny-sur-Loing he used for his sculptures, Paul de Pignol decided to dedicate a specific workshop to drawing in Paris in 2010; he established a link between these disciplines a short time afterwards. Paul de Pignol’s drawings and sculputres are a plunge into an intimate essence of 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 inside and outside.
Paul 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 unveiled bodies a spectral presence.
Since 2017, after years of wandering, Paul de Pignol found pictoral language relative to his research.
One of his most recent exhibitions, “Né du limon,” is the result of this quest. With a fascination for landscapes, Paul de Pignol is inspired by the Fontainebleau forest that surrounds his studio. The idea that any life can birth from decay fascinate him, and he creates organic and living landscapes, where you can feel the turf and soil. We are close to the Golem.
Amélie Ducommun is a franco-swiss artist born in 1983. She graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD), from the Schools of Fine-Arts of Barcelona and Lyon. For two years, she has been a resident artist at the Casa de Velazquez (2009-2011). She is living and working in Barcelona.
Amélie Ducommun has participated in many collective and individual exhibitions in France and abroad. Moreover, she participated in several contemporary art fares. Her work appears in many private and public collections, such as: the Fundació Joan Miró, the Casa de Velazquez…
More than everything, the artist is interested in nature and scrutinizes the relation she has with it. Her working process takes its roots in questioning memories of landscapes and the perception we have of the natural elements its composed by. Amélie Ducommun tries to capture the light and the first impression of the landscape in her work.
For the last decade, she got inspired by the landscapes of the French Atlantic coast focusing on waters and the aquatic world. Waters’ memories are translated through withdraws of traces on the canvas.
Recently, she put together “Walking in Memories”, a complete experience: works are suspended to the walls, sometimes in the style of “Kakemono”, but also presented on the ground. It is an invitation for the spectator to enter Amélie Ducommun’s universe.
Her cultural crossbreeding, a key element of her work, has been forged by many trips and stays abroad, in Africa, Europe and the United States. Her installations show this existential nomadism: her artistic gestures are the result of her path.
She took part in the 2016 Biennial of Marrakesh, where she exhibited at the Musée de la Palmeraie, for the first time one of her installations of water-repellant paper on curled brass.
Her creations are often backlit and sometimes supplemented with sound.
The material used, japanese white paper, suggests the ephemeral and the fragile, but also a form of evanescence underlined by their apparent levitation.
Flo Arnold’s sculptures thus float in spaces inviting us to contemplation, spirituality, and to an inner journey.
As a world’s citizen, she metaphorically feeds her sculptures of her encounters.
Flo Arnold was born in France and grew up in Casablanca, Morocoo. She had many solo shows in France and abroad, particularly at the Marrakesh Biennial in 2014 and 2016 ; and at the Loo & Lou Gallery, in Paris, in 2018. She also participated in several group shows, at the Fondation Pierre Berger and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in 2013; at the Musée de la Palmeraie in Marrakesh in 2014 ; and at the Institut Bernard Magrez, in Bordeaux, in 2017, among others.
Louise Frydman is a French artist born in 1989 in Paris. She set her art studio in Burgundy.
She graduated from the prestigious art school ESAG-Penninghen in 2012 and studied photography at ICP – International Center of Photography of New-York. For two years, she assisted the paper artist Sabrina Transiskus, on many projects including an exhibition with Sèvres – Cité de la céramique at Le Caroussel du Louvres.
Working with paper brought her to the use of clay, which has become her favorite matter to work with.
Her work consists mainly of white sculptures and mobile installations and is mostly inspired by nature.
When she met ceramist Jean-François Reboul in 2015, it enabled her to deepen her learning and affirm her artistic approach.
The same year she created her first monumental installation «La Fée des Pétales» for the Hôtel de Croisilles, in Paris.
In 2016, her sculptures were shown during a personal exhibition in Le Musée de la Tour du Moulin in Burgundy.
She presented her work in 2017 and 2019 at the Révélations art fair at Le Grand Palais in Paris. Louise now collaborates with luxury brands such as Hermès, Bonpoint, Yiqing Yin Haute Couture, she works for the real estate company Vinci Construction and sells her sculptures to interior designers such as Minassian Chahan. Her sculptures are currently presented at the designer Philippe Hurel’s showroom in Paris.
She works with the Parisian gallery Amélie Maison d’Art since 2015.
The Loo & Lou gallery presented her work at the JustLX Art fair in Lisbon in May 2019. She prepares her first solo show at the gallery for November.
In June 2019, Louise Frydman received the Prize « l’immeuble, 1’oeuvre», presented by the Minister of Culture Franck Riester, for her collaboration with Vinci Immobilier.
She was also selected at the ICAA International Competition Blanc de Chine and her work is shown in Beijing until August 1st, 2019.
Dan Barichasse was born in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1949. He lives and works in Paris. He began his pictorial journey in 1976. Dan Barichasse’s work evolved from minimal and formal shapes to the contemporary approach of the landscape taking shapes in patterns. Gradually, memory, time, creation, begetting came in circle as themes engraving his work with permanency and mutation. Series such as “Au commencement”, “Passage”, “Figures aux sources”, “Déluges” are giving the image of this time lapse, in which a poetic pictorial language emerged. Still today, invocation of mineral, vegetal, animal and human figures shows from this vocabulary. The mutation process of matter is questioned in Dan Barichasse’s work, from reshape to rotting, matter comes to dust, to the essential origins of the shapes, refined in spirituality (as in “Poussières d’ombres”, “Peintures pauvres”, “Buisson ardent”). An extreme fluidity symbolizes his work, ephemeral, shadows, dust and fire come to terms with endless and strong urging of shapes, as in the series “Éternel éphémère”, “Âmes errantes” and “Tondos”.
Dan Barichasse’s work have been acquired by the Fond National d’Art Contemporain and the Paris’ city hall collections. He participated in about thirty solo-shows and several collective exhibitions in France and abroad (Belgium, Spain, Israel, Quebec…).
The Loo and Lou Gallery will be present on the 2019 Edition of Just LX in Lisbon, Portugal. On this occasion, four artist will be presented, Dominique Lacloche, Louise Frydman, Tana Chaney and TANC. The gallery will take place on the stand B2 from 16.05.19 until 20.05.19.
Dominique Lacloche was born in 1960 in Rome (Italy). She lives between Paris and London. For over twenty years Lacloche has been creating works with the Jurassic monumental leaves of the Gunnera Manicata.
Inspired by its form and texture, her method is exploratory and empirical: an initial experiment of photographic revelation on a Gunnera leaf generated a first «image-leaf», the beginning of a series of mise en abyme visual operations in (sculpture , photography, painting) or summoning evolutionary and organic temporal systems (cinematographic editing, digital animation, sound design and electroacoustic music composition).
Her artistic work is enlightened by her vision in painting and architecture, disciplines she has studied and practiced for many years.
Lacloche’s work has been exhibited in Europe and South America and is present in several private collections.
Dominique Lacloche is represented by the Loo & Lou Gallery.
Louise Frydman was born in 1989 in Paris. She graduated from the ESAG-Penninghen in 2012 and studied at the International Center of Photography of New-York in 2013. Louise is a multidisciplinary artist who turned into ceramics.
It’s the work on paper that leads her to the use of clay, and become her favorite material. Her sculptures, mirrors, or mobile installations in white earthenware play with light and movement. Her work is an exploration of the forms of nature. She seeks the encounter between strength and fragility by working her sculptures ethereally in their forms, and powerful by their often monumental dimensions.
Beyond forms and matter, it is the encounter between the work and its environment that interests Louise Frydman, the interaction between art and architecture. She wants to create a direct and intimate relationship with the public by offering them a poetic vision of the world, provoking the imagination both in places dedicated to art and in spaces accessible to all. It’s her emotion that she tries to show.
The artist collaborates today with luxury houses such as Hermes, Bonpoint or Yiqing Yin haute couture. She lives and works between Paris and Burgundy.
Tana Chaney was born in 1978 in Sofia, Bulgaria, where she studied in the School of Fine Arts. She moved to Paris in 1997 to study at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. She graduated after studying in the atelier of Vladimir Velickovic and Dominique Gauthier.
In January 2014, she presented her first solo show, “Corps” [“Body”], in the gallery Myriam Bouagal in Paris. Tana Chaney seeks to express in her painting the body as we live it from the inside, its interactions with the outside, with the other, its metamorphoses, its movements and its contradictions. With her second solo show, “Ma place, mon corps” [“My place, my body”], the artist continues to question her relation to the body. In September 2017, she exhibited at the Galerie L’Arrivage, in Troyes, France. On this occasion, she published a text collection “Corps Traits” accompanied by inks, always exploring the same subject.
TANC (Tancrède Perrot) was born in Paris, where he lives and works. As a teenager, he started to blacken the pages of his school notebooks with indecipherable and beautiful writings. With the maturity of a visual and graffiti artist, he re-elaborates the theme of writing by deepening the research on gesture, material, line and graphology.
Influenced by many travels in North Africa and Asia, and by his contact with Arabic calligraphy and ideograms, his artistic project is focusing on the aesthetic of writing: condensed sentences reveal abstract compositions. The forms that allow us to communicate acquire an autonomous and mystical status, detached from the common expression of meaning. TANC establishes a direct link between gesture and writing, in a process of repetition of signs that approaches a state of trance. Guided by a quick gesture almost metronomic that spontaneously arises from his mind, the artist produces these signs as a plastic expression of rhythm, syntax, and the flow of the spurts of his unconscious. They punctuate the canvas and are part of a more global system, such as an imaginary cartography of a new territory of language, unreadable in a literal sense but opening a new field of understanding. His works have been exhibited around the world, from Paris to New Delhi, from New York to Shanghai.
The Loo and Lou Gallery will be present on the 2019 Edition of Art Paris Art Fair. On this occasion, the artists that will be presented are Lydie Arickx, Flo Arnold and Catherine Wilkening. The gallery will take place on the booth A21 from 04.04.19 until 07.04.19.
Lydie Arickx is a painter and a sculptor born in France in 1954 from flanders parents. After studing at the École supérieure d’arts graphiques (ESAG) in Paris, represented by Roland Topor, she is having her first solo show in the gallery Jean Briance (pastels and oils).
Since the beginning of the 80’s, she has been participating in major international events, such as the art fair in Basel, FIAC and Art Paris. In 1988, she presents her work in Belgium, in Switzerland, in Germany, in Holland, and then in Spain and USA ( first exhibition organized by Amaury Taittinger in New-York along with Francis Bacon ).
The artist often organizes cultural events on the international stage, displaying visual art and performing arts (training workshop for schools, companies, hospital, cultural events, exhibitions… ).
Lydie Arickx’s artwork figures in the major international public collections ( Musée National d’Art moderne de Paris, Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain) and in public space, such as in the Hôpital Paul-Brousse in Villejuif, Centre Hospitalier Intercommunal in Créteil, MACS in Saint-Vincent-de-Tyrosse, among others.
In 2017 she presented the solo show «Gravité» in the Loo & Lou Gallery, where she will exhibit her work again in september 2019.
She is often invited to show her work in prestigious sites of french heritage, such as in the Conciergerie for the Nuit Blanche in 2017, or in the maginificent château de Biron in Dordogne, where she currently presents a dantesque exhibition «Tant qu’il y aura des Ogres». In 2020, Lydie Arickx will exhibit her work in the Château de Chambord.
In her studio, that she considers as a site of experimentation, Lydie Arickx researches et adapts supports and materials for her artwork
(concrete, emery clothe, wood, fabric, asphalt, resin and fibers… )
Her cultural crossbreeding, a key element of her work, has been forged by many trips and stays abroad, in Africa, Europe and the United States. Her installations show this existential nomadism: her artistic gestures are the result of her path.
She took part in the 2016 Biennial of Marrakesh, where she exhibited at the Musée de la Palmeraie, for the first time one of her installations of water-repellant paper on sheathed brass. Her creations are often backlit and sometimes supplemented with sound. The material used, japanese white paper, suggests the ephemeral and the fragile, but also a form of evanescence underlined by an apparent levitation.
Flo Arnold’s sculptures thus float in spaces inviting us to contemplation, spirituality, and to an inner journey.
As a world’s citizen, she metaphorically feeds her sculptures of her encounters.
Flo Arnold was born in France and grew up in Casablanca, Morocco. She had many solo shows in France and abroad, particularly at the Marrakesh Biennial (Morocco), in 2014 and 2016 ; and at the Atelier of the Loo & Lou Gallery, in Paris (France), in 2018. She also participated in several group shows, at the Fondation Pierre Berger and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris (France), 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.
Born in Dijon in 1963, Catherine Wilkening lives and works in Paris, where she is dedicated to sculpture since 2003. Whereas it’s only since 2015 when she accepts to exhibit her work in public.
Her reputation is also due to her career as an actress since the early 1980.
Her sculptures are inspired and nourrished by the female figure, with obsessive themes: birth, chaos, death – rebirth – and provides her with the enjoyment of eternally giving birth, from a sensation, a word, or an image that obsesses her or impose itself in the moment.
On the occasion of Art Paris, she chooses to retelling of the tale the «Little Red Riding Hood» by Perrault, who ends up becoming a she-wolf and eat the mother, the grandmother and all the wolves. An allegory of these giant and devouring mouths, who are called cannibals, feed on their fellow creatures.
Catherine Wilkening has participated in numerous group show, such as «Nature» at the Caroline Tresca Gallery, in Paris, France in 2016; at the Suspenso space, in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2017; at the HOMA gallery in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2018.
She also presented her works in solo shows, including at YenakArt Villa Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand, in 2015; at the Vivienne Art Gallery, in Paris, France, in 2017; at the Loo & Lou Gallery, Paris, France, in 2018; at the Ibugallery, in Paris, France, in 2018, among others.
La dernière période de l’œuvre de Matthias Contzen, s’inscrit dans la perspective d’un ensemble de quatre sculptures en basalte noir, choisies par l’artiste comme les expressions les plus abouties de ses recherches des années 2 000. Fusion, 2007, de même que Together We Are Strong, 2005, Slow Motion, 2010, et Family, 2011 – exposées dans l’espace du Haut Marais – explorent déjà l’intériorité de la matière. Entre matité et brillance, leurs formes organiques et sensuelles ondulent, se jouent de leurs interstices et tendent vers l’infini. Dans un langage abstrait à la fois personnel et universel, s’exprime une même aspiration : réunir, embrasser une harmonie aussi originelle que fragile.
The Loo and Lou Gallery will be present on the 2019 Edition of Just Mad in Madrid, Spain. On this occasion, three artist will be presented, Flo Arnold, Christophe Miralles and Paul de Pignol. The gallery will take place on the stand C12 from 26.02.19 until 03.03.19.
Her cultural crossbreeding, a key element of her work, has been forged by many trips and stays abroad, in Africa, Europe and the United States. Her installations show this existential nomadism: her artistic gestures are the result of her path.
She took part in the 2016 Biennial of Marrakesh, where she exhibited at the Musée de la Palmeraie, for the first time one of her installations of water-repellant paper on curled brass.
Her creations are often backlit and sometimes supplemented with sound.
The material used, japanese white paper, suggests the ephemeral and the fragile, but also a form of evanescence underlined by their apparent levitation.
Flo Arnold’s sculptures thus float in spaces inviting us to contemplation, spirituality, and to an inner journey.
As a world’s citizen, she metaphorically feeds her sculptures of her encounters.
Flo Arnold was born in France and grew up in Casablanca, Morocoo. She had many solo shows in France and abroad, particularly at the Marrakesh Biennial in 2014 and 2016 ; and at the Loo & Lou Gallery, in Paris, in 2018. She also participated in several group shows, at the Fondation Pierre Berger and the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in 2013; at the Musée de la Palmeraie in Marrakesh in 2014 ; and at the Institut Bernard Magrez, in Bordeaux, in 2017, among others.
Christophe Miralles’ work is focused on a constant search for identity.
Represented alone or in pairs, his silhouettes are simple, timeless and universal figures, emblematic of the human presence. The artist offers us images that we can own and apply to our own story.
He has been exploring for twenty years now the same thematics, while digging his research and pictorial writing.
Christophe Miralles, a Franco-Spanish artist, lives and works between France and Morocco.
He presented his work in numerous solo shows, particularly at the Musée du Mémorial in Caen in 2008; at the Marrakesh Biennial in 2014 and 2016; and at the Loo & Lou Gallery, in Paris, in 2018.
He also participated in several group shows, at the Cachan Biennial in 2016, at the Marrakesh Biennial, with the Yakin&Boaz gallery in 2014 and at the Musée de la Palmeraie in Marrakesh in 2014, among others.
Paul de Pignol was born in France in 1965. He lives and works in Paris.
In 1984 he joined the Paris School of Arts (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris), at the Pierre Carron atelier. He exhibits in numerous solo shows, particularly at the Fred Lanzenberg gallery in Brussels (Belgium) in 2008 ; at the Koralewski gallery in Paris (France) in 2002; at the château de Nemours (France), in 2008 ; at the Loo & Lou Gallery, in Paris (France), in 2017.
He created his first sculpture “Fille au Ballon” in 1989, inspired by Lucas Cranach’s Venus. Progressively, the sculpture prevailed over other techniques in his work. Later, starting in 2010, drawing takes on particular relevance, as he decides to dedicate a specific workshop to it in Paris. Since then, those disciplines became undoubtedly related in his work. The artist’s drawings are an extension of his research on the volumes in which he perpetuates the sculptor’s gesture by placing light through erasing the substance in small strokes on a charcoal blackened paper. The bodies this revealed have a spectral presence.
Both in sculpture, painting and drawing, Paul de Pignol reveals a unique creation process, a dive into the intimate substance of being.
His work focuses mainly on the female figure around universal themes, birth, life and death.
The Loo and Lou Gallery will be present on the 2018 Edition of Art Paris Art Fair. On this occasion, the artists that will be presented are Dominique Lacloche and Matthias Contzen. The gallery will take place on the stand A21 from 05.04.18 until 08.04.18.
Born in Rome in 1960, Dominique Lacloche lives and works in Paris and London. In 1983 she was accepted to the School of Fine Arts, Paris, which lead in 1985 to her first artistic project in Afghanistan. In this country which was in the midst of war, she paints for months, fighting for the afghan refugees and then exhibits in London. This experiment indicates the beginning of a long series of trips to meet different populations, especially in Asia and Africa.
As a painter, Dominique Lacloche already holds dear the elements of nature and pursues long researches about the making of her paints, created from different organic extractions. During early 00’s, the artist discovers the Gunnera Manicata. She experiments using photography, video, installation and sculpture and starts to develop its notion of perception. In Paris she exhibits during the Nuit Blanche 2013, one of the most remarkable installations : « Un Degré Plus Haut ». A monumental installation composed of forty-two suspended sculptures in resin, (rising up to 55 meters high). Rising towards the top of the Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis Church, this giant mobile creates waves under the influence of the breeze : playing with juxtapositions and shadows.
Matthias Contzen was born in 1964 in Aschaffenbourg, Germany. He worked first as a musician, he played in different bands, and took multiplies trips to Europe and Africa. At the beginning of the 80’s, he started creating sculptures taking place over composing music (something that would still hold an important place in the artist’s work).
In 1987, he was accepted to the European Academy of Fine Arts in Trier, but graduates at the Sculpture Academy of Munich in 1991. He also obtains a diploma from the design department, at the Arts and Crafts Guild at the Fine Art school of Sarrebruck and won the third price at the international design contest « Cultures and materials ». Afterwards he continues his education with a bachelor in sculpture from Mayen. Matthias Contzen has been living near Lisbon, Portugal since 1998. In 2002 he was rewarded by the « City Desk », the most prestigious portuguese sculpture price, and nominated in 2003, for the Toyamura International Sculpture Biennale in Japan. In 2009 he co-funded the Sculpture Factory, Pero Pinhero in the north of Lisbon. An open space to visitors where he is currently works amongst ten artists.
His encounter with the actress Philippine Leroy – Beaulieu brought him new perspectives towards his work.From their desire to share experiments with sound, led them towards a project : « Planet » which was presented during the Nuit Blanche 2014, Paris. It was afterwards associated to the installation « For You », a witness of their common understanding about nature. Matthias Contzen sculptures are nowadays well integrated in the public spaces : In Portugal, (Caiscais, Cantanhede, Viseu, Mafra, Madere) but also in Germany, (Mayen), Spain (Corona), Canada (Toronto) and in the United Arab Emirates (Dubai, in the Burj Khalifat’s gardens). His sculptures are also in numerous art foundation collections as well as private collections in Europe, the United States, Brazil and India.
The Loo and Lou Gallery will be present on the 2018 Edition of DDESSIN in Paris. On this occasion, the artist that will be presented is Arghaël. The gallery will take place on the stand B6 from 23.03.18 until 25.03.18.
Arghaël, a director of commercials and other lms, is fascinated by the human body, which he long studied through the lens of the camera and in the editing room. Gradually, he turned to another mode of expression, initiating an intimate dialogue with the body through his raw, sensuous drawings in charcoal.
In the exhibition, a selection of 15 works from a series of drawings gives shape to and makes sense of his way of seeing, to what it means to be human and to the mystery of the flesh.
The Loo and Lou Gallery will be present on the 2018 Edition of Just Mad in Madrid, Spain. On this occasion, two artist will be presented, François Borie and Tanc. The gallery will take place on the stand 36 from 20.02.18 until 25.02.18.
François Borie is a French artist, specialized in paintings and drawings.
He was born in 1964 in Paris and grew up in France after a short stay in the United States. Since he is young, he is emerged in a multicultural universe, it gives him a taste for curiosity and discovering. Around the age of twelve, he starts creating his first drawings, highly influenced by Klee and Victor Brauner. These last few years, François Borie moved his work to a graphic exploration and automatics drawings, with surrealists inspirations.
At an age when most young people are reciting the poems of Paul Éluard, Tanc sought to drown his boredom in high school by filling the pages of his school notebook with automatic writing, as beautiful as it was illegible.
Later, he was introduced to the visual arts through grafiti, which became the art form in which he excelled and which shaped his style: action painting, precise gestures, research on materials and the use of the accidental.
The repeated writing of his grafiti name, TANC, led him to abstract painting in the early 2000s. He concentrated on studio work and distinguished himself from other graf ti artists with artworks based essentially on the line, the result of his research on the synthesis of his name and his tags.
Inspired by his travels in North Africa, where he studied the forms of the Arabic language, and in Asia, where he took an interest in ideograms, he decided to devote several series of paintings to the automatic writing he had been doing since adolescence. He was greatly inspired by the pictorial work of Henri Michaux and his experiences on mescaline for this project.
The Loo and Lou Gallery will be present on the 2017 Edition of Art Paris Art Fair. On this occasion, two artist will be presented, Lydia Arickx and Johan Van Mullem. The gallery will take place on the stand A21 from 30.03.17 until 02.04.17.
Trained as an architect, Johan Van Mullem is a painter, illustrator and sculptor. His interest in art dates from his childhood, during which he tirelessly drew pictures of faces, a major theme in his work, going beyond portraiture.
Johan Van Mullem instinctively captures the essence of humanity hidden in timeless faces that are barely representative. Shaped by successive additions and subtractions, they emerge from the canvas, incarnating the many faces of humanity. A painter of movement and light, Johan Van Mullem works with highly diluted printer’s ink, which he builds up in layers.
Lydie Arickx is a painter and a sculptor born in France in 1954. Since the beginning of the 80’s, she has been participating in major international events.
In 1988, she presented her work in Belgium, in Switzerland, in Germany, in Holland, and then in Spain and USA ( first exhibition organized by Amaury Taittinger in New- York along with Francis Bacon ). Lydie Arickx often organizes cultural events on the international stage, displaying visual art and performing arts such as training workshop for schools, companies, hospital, cultural events and exhibitions.
