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.
Andrew Ntshabele lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the midst of the urban unrest that fuels his inspiration. He sees the physical, socio-economic and political changes of the post-apartheid city as the results of rapid urbanization. His daily interactions with the residents lead him to investigate this difficult social reality, and to seek to understand the root cause of the current degradation of the inner city.
Andrew Ntshabele lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the midst of the urban unrest that fuels his inspiration. He sees the physical, socio-economic and political changes of the post-apartheid city as the results of rapid urbanization. His daily interactions with the residents lead him to investigate this difficult social reality, and to seek to understand the root cause of the current degradation of the inner city.
Born in 1959 in Brazzaville, Congo. Lives and works in Saint-Nazaire. Biologist of formation, Olivier de Sagazan is interested in life and seeks to establish through his work, a sort of genea-logy of the sensitive to understand how at a given moment, the inert matter structured in cells has generated life and sensitivity.
Born in 1959 in Brazzaville, Congo. Lives and works in Saint-Nazaire. Biologist of formation, Olivier de Sagazan is interested in life and seeks to establish through his work, a sort of genea-logy of the sensitive to understand how at a given moment, the inert matter structured in cells has generated life and sensitivity.
Born in 1959 in Brazzaville, Congo. Lives and works in Saint-Nazaire. Biologist of formation, Olivier de Sagazan is interested in life and seeks to establish through his work, a sort of genea-logy of the sensitive to understand how at a given moment, the inert matter structured in cells has generated life and sensitivity.
Born in 1959 in Brazzaville, Congo. Lives and works in Saint-Nazaire. Biologist of formation, Olivier de Sagazan is interested in life and seeks to establish through his work, a sort of genea-logy of the sensitive to understand how at a given moment, the inert matter structured in cells has generated life and sensitivity.
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.
Andrew Ntshabele lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the midst of the urban unrest that fuels his inspiration. He sees the physical, socio-economic and political changes of the post-apartheid city as the results of rapid urbanization. His daily interactions with the residents lead him to investigate this difficult social reality, and to seek to understand the root cause of the current degradation of the inner city.
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.
Andrew Ntshabele lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the midst of the urban unrest that fuels his inspiration. He sees the physical, socio-economic and political changes of the post-apartheid city as the results of rapid urbanization. His daily interactions with the residents lead him to investigate this difficult social reality, and to seek to understand the root cause of the current degradation of the inner city.
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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
Johan Van Mullem exhibits at Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique.
A project supported by Loo&Lou Foundation
Published on April 7, 2023
From 31 March to 23 July, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (RMFAB) present For Love’s S(n)ake! an exhibition by Belgian artist Johan Van Mullem.
By inviting Johan Van Mullem to the heart of their collection of Ancient Art, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium establish their role of catalyst to pass on history to the widest audience possible, therefor actively embodying their support for the contemporary creation that puts down its roots in Brussels.
Originally from Bruges and now a Brussels’ citizen, Johan Van Mullem stands as a true national flagship and a renowned multidisciplinary artist. He will be the only Belgian contemporary artist to be exhibited at the RMFAB this year, and the exhibition is the perfect opportunity to build bridges with his native country. As the only Belgian contemporary artist to be exhibited at the RMFAB in 2023, he meets his country through this exhibition.
By questioning our changing society in his own individual way, he finds his place within the Remedies exhibitions’ program. Confronted with the ills and symptoms of our humanity, Johan Van Mullem’s art tends to offer a therapeutic path and seems to suggest possible remedies by encouraging us to slow down, reflect and meditate.
For Love’s S(n)ake! reveals never before shown pieces as well as the latest work produced by the Brussels artist. The body of works on display contrasts with what the public knows of the artist’s work, namely his depictions of phantasmagoric faces, reflecting on what lies within, presented notably during his monographic exhibition at the Musée d’Ixelles in 2016-2017.
A transition has taken place in recent years from portraits to nature. The health crisis and successive lockdowns have had a catalytic effect on his practice. Forced to slow down, the artist rediscovered his (inner) garden, a new horizon that inspired him to create universes more oriented towards the exterior. The vegetal dimension calls for serendipity and the artist’s colour palette blooms through the dreamy landscapes. The overall effect culminates in a peculiar luminescence enhanced by the use of printing and etching inks.
Between emotions and memory, between movement and light, some fifty new works, sometimes of an impressive format, open up a timeframe far from any urgency, and offer the public a new perspective, inscribing contemporary creation in its historical roots.
Joël Person at the first edition of the Drawing Festival in Arles
Published on April 6, 2023
Joël Person participates in the first edition of the Arles drawing festival, among 41 other artists, initiated by Vera Michalski and Frédéric Pajak.
Project’sintention
Drawing is the first art form we come across in childhood; it is also the first known art form used by our prehistoric ancestors. Despite a long history of being left on the sidelines and overlooked in favour of painting, drawing has seen a resurgence in recent years in schools of fine art, galleries and museums. Vera Michalski, president of the Libella publishing group, and Frédéric Pajak, an illustrator, writer and director of Les Cahiers Dessinés publishing house, took the initiative to give this art form its full scope by creating the « Festival du Dessin », an annual festival dedicated to it that will interest both the general public and discerning audiences. What better place to host such an event than the city of Arles, famed for the beauty of its historical monuments, Van Gogh and the Rencontres d’Arles festival of photography? From 2023 onwards, the most magnificent venues in Arles – museums, churches, cloisters, private mansions, foundations and cultural hubs – will welcome the Festival du Dessin every spring. Theatres, bookshops and cinemas will also be participating, as will educational institutions, to showcase more than 1,000 works and some forty artists, for the most part established, as well as some forgotten or as yet little-known figures. It will create a dialogue between artistic drawing, comic art, editorial cartoons, art brut drawings and alternative drawings – those produced by writers, filmmakers and major fashion figures. Taking place over three weeks and four weekends, the Festival du Dessin aims to hold debates, meet-and-greets and autograph sessions with today’s illustrators, film screenings, concerts and many other celebratory events alongside the exhibitions.
Joël Person will exhibit at the Saint-Césaire enclosure as well as at the Espace Van Gogh, alongside Hervé Di Rosa and Anna Sommer.
He will also participate in the drawing concert of the National Orchestra of Cannes on May 3 at the Théâtre Antique in Arles. He will realize a performance of drawings on the spot, projected live on a giant screen, in collaboration with Anna Sommer.
Jean Claude Wouters presents his new exhibition at the ALIEN Art Centre in Taiwan
Published on November 16, 2022
Artist photographer Jean Claude Wouters presents “Light of Void” at the Alien Art Centre in Taiwan, alongside artist Arman from November 23, 2022 to March 9, 2023.
The title of the current exhibition Light of Void, includes purposely the word “light”. It is presently this special light Wouters’ works speak about. “I draw with light, I don’t make a copy of reality”, Wouters says. In japanese photography is translated by shashin, two ideograms meaning copy/reality. In most occasions, photography is used as “a copy of reality”, rather than “drawing with light”. I prefer to think of the photography of the beginnings, in the XIX century, with its special painting feeling.” All the technics Wouters use are very traditional photographic ones and it is a fact that most of them are disappearing quickly pushed out by the new digital technology for photography. In a few years from now, Wouters might not be able to create more the art pieces he makes today that we can see in this current exhibition, while the special mat baryte paper he uses has already became difficult to find. We won’t see anywhere else such a refined nuance of greys like in Wouters’ work– which are never black and white but merely a unique greyish.
Elisabeth Daynès intervenes in the Symposium “Images de l’homme fossile” at the Collège de France
Published on June 16, 2022
Elisabeth Daynès participates in the symposium “Images de l’homme fossile” organized by the Collège de France on Friday June 17, 2022. She will talk about “The Search for Lost Identities”. As an artist, Elisabeth Daynès brings reflection about identity, the significance of the skull, and the face, from our origins, to today, until the future. Her art toys discontinuously with science because science plays a big role in our imaginary.
The symposium focuses on the multiple images of the fossil man :
“From the beginning, research on human evolution and prehistory has had a double function. On the one hand, they have developed as new scientific disciplines, at the borders of biology and human sciences. On the other hand, they provided, in the West at least, the substance of a new account of origins that could replace that which the Bible had delivered for centuries.
This mythological and narrative dimension undoubtedly explains in part the fascination that this field of knowledge has always held for the public. Very quickly, the literature and the plastic arts took possession of the “prehistoric” theme, while the scientific knowledge remained still embryonic. A phantasmal prehistory has always rubbed shoulders with the one that archaeologists and paleontologists were trying to reconstitute. The border between the two remained porous and, in their attempts to fill the gaps in the fossil record, the researchers themselves were never free of subjectivity.
This account of origins touches us probably too closely to escape religious, philosophical and sometimes even political presuppositions. Each historical period has produced its own prehistory and human evolution, in accordance with the spirit of the time.
During this symposium, paleoanthropologists and historians of science will discuss the representations of fossil men and Paleolithic societies as they are produced by scientific works, then delivered to the public.”
IMAGES DE L’HOMME FOSSILE
Symposium
Friday, June 17, 2022
all day – Lecture is open to all, free of charge and without prior registration
Louise Frydman is a French artist who was born in 1989 in Paris.
She graduated from ESAG-Penninghen School of Art in 2012 and studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York.
Her studio is located in Burgundy since 2015. Louise Frydman began by composing light and delicate works in white paper and then turned to ceramics in 2015 when she created her monumental piece La Fée des Pétales hanging in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Croisilles in Paris.
In treating ceramics, she will preserve the white matte of the paper as well as the delicacy of the material. Her sculptures, mirrors, or mobile installations, inspired by the forms of nature, play with light and movement. Her meeting with the ceramist Jean-François Reboul in 2015 allowed her to deepen her learning and to assert herself in her artistic approach. She exhibits her work in 2017 and 2019 at the Revelations Biennal at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Today, Louise Frydman collaborates with luxury houses such as Hermès, Bonpoint or Yiqing Yin haute couture, she works with the promoter Vinci Immobilier and sells her sculptures to decorators such as Minassian Chahan. In June 2019, Louise Frydman was awarded the “1 immeuble, 1 œuvre” Prize by the Minister of Culture Franck Riester, for her collaboration with Vinci Immobilier. Her work was also selected for the ICAA International White China Competition, whose exhibition took place in Beijing in August 2019. Her sculptures are currently presented at the showroom of the designer Philippe Hurel in Paris in the first arrondissement.
Loo & Lou Gallery exhibited her work for the first time at the fair JustLX in Lisbon in May 2019. Since then, she has had two solo exhibitions, one entitled Nature Fragile in the Loo & Lou Atelier and the second, Contemporary Ceramics, in the gallery’s space at George V.
Louise Frydman is a French artist who was born in 1989 in Paris.
She graduated from ESAG-Penninghen School of Art in 2012 and studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York.
Her studio is located in Burgundy since 2015. Louise Frydman began by composing light and delicate works in white paper and then turned to ceramics in 2015 when she created her monumental piece La Fée des Pétales hanging in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Croisilles in Paris.
In treating ceramics, she will preserve the white matte of the paper as well as the delicacy of the material. Her sculptures, mirrors, or mobile installations, inspired by the forms of nature, play with light and movement. Her meeting with the ceramist Jean-François Reboul in 2015 allowed her to deepen her learning and to assert herself in her artistic approach. She exhibits her work in 2017 and 2019 at the Revelations Biennal at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Today, Louise Frydman collaborates with luxury houses such as Hermès, Bonpoint or Yiqing Yin haute couture, she works with the promoter Vinci Immobilier and sells her sculptures to decorators such as Minassian Chahan. In June 2019, Louise Frydman was awarded the “1 immeuble, 1 œuvre” Prize by the Minister of Culture Franck Riester, for her collaboration with Vinci Immobilier. Her work was also selected for the ICAA International White China Competition, whose exhibition took place in Beijing in August 2019. Her sculptures are currently presented at the showroom of the designer Philippe Hurel in Paris in the first arrondissement.
Loo & Lou Gallery exhibited her work for the first time at the fair JustLX in Lisbon in May 2019. Since then, she has had two solo exhibitions, one entitled Nature Fragile in the Loo & Lou Atelier and the second, Contemporary Ceramics, in the gallery’s space at George V.
Louise Frydman is a French artist who was born in 1989 in Paris.
She graduated from ESAG-Penninghen School of Art in 2012 and studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York.
Her studio is located in Burgundy since 2015. Louise Frydman began by composing light and delicate works in white paper and then turned to ceramics in 2015 when she created her monumental piece La Fée des Pétales hanging in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Croisilles in Paris.
In treating ceramics, she will preserve the white matte of the paper as well as the delicacy of the material. Her sculptures, mirrors, or mobile installations, inspired by the forms of nature, play with light and movement. Her meeting with the ceramist Jean-François Reboul in 2015 allowed her to deepen her learning and to assert herself in her artistic approach. She exhibits her work in 2017 and 2019 at the Revelations Biennal at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Today, Louise Frydman collaborates with luxury houses such as Hermès, Bonpoint or Yiqing Yin haute couture, she works with the promoter Vinci Immobilier and sells her sculptures to decorators such as Minassian Chahan. In June 2019, Louise Frydman was awarded the “1 immeuble, 1 œuvre” Prize by the Minister of Culture Franck Riester, for her collaboration with Vinci Immobilier. Her work was also selected for the ICAA International White China Competition, whose exhibition took place in Beijing in August 2019. Her sculptures are currently presented at the showroom of the designer Philippe Hurel in Paris in the first arrondissement.
Loo & Lou Gallery exhibited her work for the first time at the fair JustLX in Lisbon in May 2019. Since then, she has had two solo exhibitions, one entitled Nature Fragile in the Loo & Lou Atelier and the second, Contemporary Ceramics, in the gallery’s space at George V.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
N°631 Serie Carbone, mixed technic, wood charcoal on paper, 150x200 cm, 2023, Pierre-Luc Poujol
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, in spring 2022 Pierre-Luc Poujol will become the first ambassador of the French NGO Coeur de Forêt, for which he will lend his voice and his paintbrushes in support of the preservation of our biodiversity.
N°631 Serie Carbone, mixed technic, wood charcoal on paper, 150x200 cm, 2023, Pierre-Luc Poujol
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, in spring 2022 Pierre-Luc Poujol will become the first ambassador of the French NGO Coeur de Forêt, for which he will lend his voice and his paintbrushes in support of the preservation of our biodiversity.
N°631 Serie Carbone, mixed technic, wood charcoal on paper, 150x200 cm, 2023, Pierre-Luc Poujol
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, in spring 2022 Pierre-Luc Poujol will become the first ambassador of the French NGO Coeur de Forêt, for which he will lend his voice and his paintbrushes in support of the preservation of our biodiversity.
From painting to drawing, and through sculpture, the visual artist SylC places humanity at the center of her work. Strongly infused with dreamlike elements, her oeuvre reveals our true identity, our paradoxes, our dualities… By frequently associating the human with the animal or the plant, the artist sheds light on the woven connections between beings and those we maintain with nature; she highlights hybridization and metamorphosis, symbols of the complexity of our personalities, but also of adaptation, renewal, and the perpetual evolution of our identity.
From painting to drawing, and through sculpture, the visual artist SylC places humanity at the center of her work. Strongly infused with dreamlike elements, her oeuvre reveals our true identity, our paradoxes, our dualities… By frequently associating the human with the animal or the plant, the artist sheds light on the woven connections between beings and those we maintain with nature; she highlights hybridization and metamorphosis, symbols of the complexity of our personalities, but also of adaptation, renewal, and the perpetual evolution of our identity.
From painting to drawing, and through sculpture, the visual artist SylC places humanity at the center of her work. Strongly infused with dreamlike elements, her oeuvre reveals our true identity, our paradoxes, our dualities… By frequently associating the human with the animal or the plant, the artist sheds light on the woven connections between beings and those we maintain with nature; she highlights hybridization and metamorphosis, symbols of the complexity of our personalities, but also of adaptation, renewal, and the perpetual evolution of our identity.
With the humble Bic Biro as his tool of choice, London-based Powell creates intricate portraits on antique documents. His favoured subjects are elderly, a natural fit for the paper he uses and his detailed style: post marks and typography merge with pen strokes to create a captivating whole.
With the humble Bic Biro as his tool of choice, London-based Powell creates intricate portraits on antique documents. His favoured subjects are elderly, a natural fit for the paper he uses and his detailed style: post marks and typography merge with pen strokes to create a captivating whole.
With the humble Bic Biro as his tool of choice, London-based Powell creates intricate portraits on antique documents. His favoured subjects are elderly, a natural fit for the paper he uses and his detailed style: post marks and typography merge with pen strokes to create a captivating whole.
With the humble Bic Biro as his tool of choice, London-based Powell creates intricate portraits on antique documents. His favoured subjects are elderly, a natural fit for the paper he uses and his detailed style: post marks and typography merge with pen strokes to create a captivating whole.
With the humble Bic Biro as his tool of choice, London-based Powell creates intricate portraits on antique documents. His favoured subjects are elderly, a natural fit for the paper he uses and his detailed style: post marks and typography merge with pen strokes to create a captivating whole.
Born in 1970, Christophe Miralles is a Franco-Spanish artist who lives and works between Burgundy and Casablanca.
His work is nourished by various sources that go back to its origins: from his Moroccan roots, one can note some Mediterranean influences coming from two shores, which resonate and never collide with each other. Spanish painting from the Golden Age undoubtedly sealed his relationship with light and compositions: we can see in his work the influence of figures such as Velázquez, Zurbarán or El Greco.
Human figures suspended in the void haunt his canvases inviting worrying feelings and a certain nostalgia. These are depersonalized figures, devoid of identity, which remind us of Francis Bacon’s characters. The combination of simplified forms and subtle nuances in colors allows him to give an intemporal aspect to his paintings, where the material is the main subject.
Miralles creates oil paintings on paper and canvas, and uses lacquers. He brought together a series for an exhibition at Loo & Lou Gallery entitled Territoire Unique in April 2018. His works spoke of humanity, travel, and tolerance. Colors burn through his canvases, engorging the space in flames wherein the ashes slowly fall on his large black papers. He is a painter anchored in contemporary society, a territory that he hopes is unique for all. This work was complemented and nourished by the exhibition Vertige du monde by the artist Flo Arnold, presented in collaboration at the Loo & Lou Gallery’s Atelier.
He has received several artistic prizes, such as the Grand Prix Claire Combes of the Taylor Foundation in 2007, the Prix Azart in 2005 or the Prix Charles Oulmont in 2004, which he received with honors from the jury. His work has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions in France and abroad and his work is included in several collections. He has also participated in several fairs, including JustMad (Madrid, Spain) with the gallery Loo & Lou in 2019, the Marrakech Biennale (Marrakech, Morocco) or Art Up (Lille, France) in 2016.
Born in 1970, Christophe Miralles is a Franco-Spanish artist who lives and works between Burgundy and Casablanca.
His work is nourished by various sources that go back to its origins: from his Moroccan roots, one can note some Mediterranean influences coming from two shores, which resonate and never collide with each other. Spanish painting from the Golden Age undoubtedly sealed his relationship with light and compositions: we can see in his work the influence of figures such as Velázquez, Zurbarán or El Greco.
Human figures suspended in the void haunt his canvases inviting worrying feelings and a certain nostalgia. These are depersonalized figures, devoid of identity, which remind us of Francis Bacon’s characters. The combination of simplified forms and subtle nuances in colors allows him to give an intemporal aspect to his paintings, where the material is the main subject.
Miralles creates oil paintings on paper and canvas, and uses lacquers. He brought together a series for an exhibition at Loo & Lou Gallery entitled Territoire Unique in April 2018. His works spoke of humanity, travel, and tolerance. Colors burn through his canvases, engorging the space in flames wherein the ashes slowly fall on his large black papers. He is a painter anchored in contemporary society, a territory that he hopes is unique for all. This work was complemented and nourished by the exhibition Vertige du monde by the artist Flo Arnold, presented in collaboration at the Loo & Lou Gallery’s Atelier.
He has received several artistic prizes, such as the Grand Prix Claire Combes of the Taylor Foundation in 2007, the Prix Azart in 2005 or the Prix Charles Oulmont in 2004, which he received with honors from the jury. His work has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions in France and abroad and his work is included in several collections. He has also participated in several fairs, including JustMad (Madrid, Spain) with the gallery Loo & Lou in 2019, the Marrakech Biennale (Marrakech, Morocco) or Art Up (Lille, France) in 2016.
Born in 1970, Christophe Miralles is a Franco-Spanish artist who lives and works between Burgundy and Casablanca.
His work is nourished by various sources that go back to its origins: from his Moroccan roots, one can note some Mediterranean influences coming from two shores, which resonate and never collide with each other. Spanish painting from the Golden Age undoubtedly sealed his relationship with light and compositions: we can see in his work the influence of figures such as Velázquez, Zurbarán or El Greco.
Human figures suspended in the void haunt his canvases inviting worrying feelings and a certain nostalgia. These are depersonalized figures, devoid of identity, which remind us of Francis Bacon’s characters. The combination of simplified forms and subtle nuances in colors allows him to give an intemporal aspect to his paintings, where the material is the main subject.
Miralles creates oil paintings on paper and canvas, and uses lacquers. He brought together a series for an exhibition at Loo & Lou Gallery entitled Territoire Unique in April 2018. His works spoke of humanity, travel, and tolerance. Colors burn through his canvases, engorging the space in flames wherein the ashes slowly fall on his large black papers. He is a painter anchored in contemporary society, a territory that he hopes is unique for all. This work was complemented and nourished by the exhibition Vertige du monde by the artist Flo Arnold, presented in collaboration at the Loo & Lou Gallery’s Atelier.
He has received several artistic prizes, such as the Grand Prix Claire Combes of the Taylor Foundation in 2007, the Prix Azart in 2005 or the Prix Charles Oulmont in 2004, which he received with honors from the jury. His work has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions in France and abroad and his work is included in several collections. He has also participated in several fairs, including JustMad (Madrid, Spain) with the gallery Loo & Lou in 2019, the Marrakech Biennale (Marrakech, Morocco) or Art Up (Lille, France) in 2016.
Born in 1970, Christophe Miralles is a Franco-Spanish artist who lives and works between Burgundy and Casablanca.
His work is nourished by various sources that go back to its origins: from his Moroccan roots, one can note some Mediterranean influences coming from two shores, which resonate and never collide with each other. Spanish painting from the Golden Age undoubtedly sealed his relationship with light and compositions: we can see in his work the influence of figures such as Velázquez, Zurbarán or El Greco.
Human figures suspended in the void haunt his canvases inviting worrying feelings and a certain nostalgia. These are depersonalized figures, devoid of identity, which remind us of Francis Bacon’s characters. The combination of simplified forms and subtle nuances in colors allows him to give an intemporal aspect to his paintings, where the material is the main subject.
Miralles creates oil paintings on paper and canvas, and uses lacquers. He brought together a series for an exhibition at Loo & Lou Gallery entitled Territoire Unique in April 2018. His works spoke of humanity, travel, and tolerance. Colors burn through his canvases, engorging the space in flames wherein the ashes slowly fall on his large black papers. He is a painter anchored in contemporary society, a territory that he hopes is unique for all. This work was complemented and nourished by the exhibition Vertige du monde by the artist Flo Arnold, presented in collaboration at the Loo & Lou Gallery’s Atelier.
He has received several artistic prizes, such as the Grand Prix Claire Combes of the Taylor Foundation in 2007, the Prix Azart in 2005 or the Prix Charles Oulmont in 2004, which he received with honors from the jury. His work has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions in France and abroad and his work is included in several collections. He has also participated in several fairs, including JustMad (Madrid, Spain) with the gallery Loo & Lou in 2019, the Marrakech Biennale (Marrakech, Morocco) or Art Up (Lille, France) in 2016.
Born in 1970, Christophe Miralles is a Franco-Spanish artist who lives and works between Burgundy and Casablanca.
His work is nourished by various sources that go back to its origins: from his Moroccan roots, one can note some Mediterranean influences coming from two shores, which resonate and never collide with each other. Spanish painting from the Golden Age undoubtedly sealed his relationship with light and compositions: we can see in his work the influence of figures such as Velázquez, Zurbarán or El Greco.
Human figures suspended in the void haunt his canvases inviting worrying feelings and a certain nostalgia. These are depersonalized figures, devoid of identity, which remind us of Francis Bacon’s characters. The combination of simplified forms and subtle nuances in colors allows him to give an intemporal aspect to his paintings, where the material is the main subject.
Miralles creates oil paintings on paper and canvas, and uses lacquers. He brought together a series for an exhibition at Loo & Lou Gallery entitled Territoire Unique in April 2018. His works spoke of humanity, travel, and tolerance. Colors burn through his canvases, engorging the space in flames wherein the ashes slowly fall on his large black papers. He is a painter anchored in contemporary society, a territory that he hopes is unique for all. This work was complemented and nourished by the exhibition Vertige du monde by the artist Flo Arnold, presented in collaboration at the Loo & Lou Gallery’s Atelier.
He has received several artistic prizes, such as the Grand Prix Claire Combes of the Taylor Foundation in 2007, the Prix Azart in 2005 or the Prix Charles Oulmont in 2004, which he received with honors from the jury. His work has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions in France and abroad and his work is included in several collections. He has also participated in several fairs, including JustMad (Madrid, Spain) with the gallery Loo & Lou in 2019, the Marrakech Biennale (Marrakech, Morocco) or Art Up (Lille, France) in 2016.
Born in 1970, Christophe Miralles is a Franco-Spanish artist who lives and works between Burgundy and Casablanca.
His work is nourished by various sources that go back to its origins: from his Moroccan roots, one can note some Mediterranean influences coming from two shores, which resonate and never collide with each other. Spanish painting from the Golden Age undoubtedly sealed his relationship with light and compositions: we can see in his work the influence of figures such as Velázquez, Zurbarán or El Greco.
Human figures suspended in the void haunt his canvases inviting worrying feelings and a certain nostalgia. These are depersonalized figures, devoid of identity, which remind us of Francis Bacon’s characters. The combination of simplified forms and subtle nuances in colors allows him to give an intemporal aspect to his paintings, where the material is the main subject.
Miralles creates oil paintings on paper and canvas, and uses lacquers. He brought together a series for an exhibition at Loo & Lou Gallery entitled Territoire Unique in April 2018. His works spoke of humanity, travel, and tolerance. Colors burn through his canvases, engorging the space in flames wherein the ashes slowly fall on his large black papers. He is a painter anchored in contemporary society, a territory that he hopes is unique for all. This work was complemented and nourished by the exhibition Vertige du monde by the artist Flo Arnold, presented in collaboration at the Loo & Lou Gallery’s Atelier.
He has received several artistic prizes, such as the Grand Prix Claire Combes of the Taylor Foundation in 2007, the Prix Azart in 2005 or the Prix Charles Oulmont in 2004, which he received with honors from the jury. His work has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions in France and abroad and his work is included in several collections. He has also participated in several fairs, including JustMad (Madrid, Spain) with the gallery Loo & Lou in 2019, the Marrakech Biennale (Marrakech, Morocco) or Art Up (Lille, France) in 2016.
Born in 1970, Christophe Miralles is a Franco-Spanish artist who lives and works between Burgundy and Casablanca.
His work is nourished by various sources that go back to its origins: from his Moroccan roots, one can note some Mediterranean influences coming from two shores, which resonate and never collide with each other. Spanish painting from the Golden Age undoubtedly sealed his relationship with light and compositions: we can see in his work the influence of figures such as Velázquez, Zurbarán or El Greco.
Human figures suspended in the void haunt his canvases inviting worrying feelings and a certain nostalgia. These are depersonalized figures, devoid of identity, which remind us of Francis Bacon’s characters. The combination of simplified forms and subtle nuances in colors allows him to give an intemporal aspect to his paintings, where the material is the main subject.
Miralles creates oil paintings on paper and canvas, and uses lacquers. He brought together a series for an exhibition at Loo & Lou Gallery entitled Territoire Unique in April 2018. His works spoke of humanity, travel, and tolerance. Colors burn through his canvases, engorging the space in flames wherein the ashes slowly fall on his large black papers. He is a painter anchored in contemporary society, a territory that he hopes is unique for all. This work was complemented and nourished by the exhibition Vertige du monde by the artist Flo Arnold, presented in collaboration at the Loo & Lou Gallery’s Atelier.
He has received several artistic prizes, such as the Grand Prix Claire Combes of the Taylor Foundation in 2007, the Prix Azart in 2005 or the Prix Charles Oulmont in 2004, which he received with honors from the jury. His work has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions in France and abroad and his work is included in several collections. He has also participated in several fairs, including JustMad (Madrid, Spain) with the gallery Loo & Lou in 2019, the Marrakech Biennale (Marrakech, Morocco) or Art Up (Lille, France) in 2016.
Cedric Le Corf was born in 1985 in Bühl (Germany). He graduated with honors from the École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne in Lorient (France) in 2009. Today, he lives and works in Brittany.
The subject of his work lends itself to anatomical landscapes inspired by Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty’s boards, where little by little, a dismembered man is transformed into a landscape of a man. Humans, trees, and the earth all possess in common a kind “skin” and with it the ability to be flayed. Is it untrue to think that a dissected body is merely a wide range of landscapes, full of mishaps, folds, and crevices? The coarseness of bone is reminiscent to the rocky landscapes of Patinir; the venous, arterial, or nervous network irrigates like rivers, plains, and estuaries; the muscles, the clay of Genesis, model gorges and mounds.
Following 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 of a spinal nerve. It therefore juxtaposes a raw element of chaos with 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 these motifs, to deafen the subject that his work contains.
Cedric Le Corf was born in 1985 in Bühl (Germany). He graduated with honors from the École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne in Lorient (France) in 2009. Today, he lives and works in Brittany.
The subject of his work lends itself to anatomical landscapes inspired by Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty’s boards, where little by little, a dismembered man is transformed into a landscape of a man. Humans, trees, and the earth all possess in common a kind “skin” and with it the ability to be flayed. Is it untrue to think that a dissected body is merely a wide range of landscapes, full of mishaps, folds, and crevices? The coarseness of bone is reminiscent to the rocky landscapes of Patinir; the venous, arterial, or nervous network irrigates like rivers, plains, and estuaries; the muscles, the clay of Genesis, model gorges and mounds.
Following 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 of a spinal nerve. It therefore juxtaposes a raw element of chaos with 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 these motifs, to deafen the subject that his work contains.
Cedric Le Corf was born in 1985 in Bühl (Germany). He graduated with honors from the École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne in Lorient (France) in 2009. Today, he lives and works in Brittany.
The subject of his work lends itself to anatomical landscapes inspired by Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty’s boards, where little by little, a dismembered man is transformed into a landscape of a man. Humans, trees, and the earth all possess in common a kind “skin” and with it the ability to be flayed. Is it untrue to think that a dissected body is merely a wide range of landscapes, full of mishaps, folds, and crevices? The coarseness of bone is reminiscent to the rocky landscapes of Patinir; the venous, arterial, or nervous network irrigates like rivers, plains, and estuaries; the muscles, the clay of Genesis, model gorges and mounds.
Following 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 of a spinal nerve. It therefore juxtaposes a raw element of chaos with 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 these motifs, to deafen the subject that his work contains.
Cedric Le Corf was born in 1985 in Bühl (Germany). He graduated with honors from the École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne in Lorient (France) in 2009. Today, he lives and works in Brittany.
The subject of his work lends itself to anatomical landscapes inspired by Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty’s boards, where little by little, a dismembered man is transformed into a landscape of a man. Humans, trees, and the earth all possess in common a kind “skin” and with it the ability to be flayed. Is it untrue to think that a dissected body is merely a wide range of landscapes, full of mishaps, folds, and crevices? The coarseness of bone is reminiscent to the rocky landscapes of Patinir; the venous, arterial, or nervous network irrigates like rivers, plains, and estuaries; the muscles, the clay of Genesis, model gorges and mounds.
Following 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 of a spinal nerve. It therefore juxtaposes a raw element of chaos with 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 these motifs, to deafen the subject that his work contains.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
For this first collaboration between Anna De Leidi and the Loo & Lou, the Italian artist is invited to invest the walls of the Atelier with a set of collages started during the isolation of the first confinements.
Starting from an intuition, Anna De Leidi draws from a stock of various clippings, archival images and magazines to assemble them according to an artistic and personal development nourished by references to the history of art and political life – in particular the artistic avant-garde and the protest movements. The superimposed archival images accumulate layers of meaning, without denying the abstraction due to the fortuitous harmony of colors and shapes of the torn papers. Without any pre-determination, apart from that of this first intuition, the collage unfolds and composes itself to form a work embellished with an evocative title, sometimes on the borders of poetry.
The artist summarizes her research as follows: “Narrative, composition, color”.
For this first collaboration between Anna De Leidi and the Loo & Lou, the Italian artist is invited to invest the walls of the Atelier with a set of collages started during the isolation of the first confinements.
Starting from an intuition, Anna De Leidi draws from a stock of various clippings, archival images and magazines to assemble them according to an artistic and personal development nourished by references to the history of art and political life – in particular the artistic avant-garde and the protest movements. The superimposed archival images accumulate layers of meaning, without denying the abstraction due to the fortuitous harmony of colors and shapes of the torn papers. Without any pre-determination, apart from that of this first intuition, the collage unfolds and composes itself to form a work embellished with an evocative title, sometimes on the borders of poetry.
The artist summarizes her research as follows: “Narrative, composition, color”.
For this first collaboration between Anna De Leidi and the Loo & Lou, the Italian artist is invited to invest the walls of the Atelier with a set of collages started during the isolation of the first confinements.
Starting from an intuition, Anna De Leidi draws from a stock of various clippings, archival images and magazines to assemble them according to an artistic and personal development nourished by references to the history of art and political life – in particular the artistic avant-garde and the protest movements. The superimposed archival images accumulate layers of meaning, without denying the abstraction due to the fortuitous harmony of colors and shapes of the torn papers. Without any pre-determination, apart from that of this first intuition, the collage unfolds and composes itself to form a work embellished with an evocative title, sometimes on the borders of poetry.
The artist summarizes her research as follows: “Narrative, composition, color”.
Born in 1970, Christophe Miralles is a Franco-Spanish artist who lives and works between Burgundy and Casablanca.
His work is nourished by various sources that go back to its origins: from his Moroccan roots, one can note some Mediterranean influences coming from two shores, which resonate and never collide with each other. Spanish painting from the Golden Age undoubtedly sealed his relationship with light and compositions: we can see in his work the influence of figures such as Velázquez, Zurbarán or El Greco.
Human figures suspended in the void haunt his canvases inviting worrying feelings and a certain nostalgia. These are depersonalized figures, devoid of identity, which remind us of Francis Bacon’s characters. The combination of simplified forms and subtle nuances in colors allows him to give an intemporal aspect to his paintings, where the material is the main subject.
Miralles creates oil paintings on paper and canvas, and uses lacquers. He brought together a series for an exhibition at Loo & Lou Gallery entitled Territoire Unique in April 2018. His works spoke of humanity, travel, and tolerance. Colors burn through his canvases, engorging the space in flames wherein the ashes slowly fall on his large black papers. He is a painter anchored in contemporary society, a territory that he hopes is unique for all. This work was complemented and nourished by the exhibition Vertige du monde by the artist Flo Arnold, presented in collaboration at the Loo & Lou Gallery’s Atelier.
He has received several artistic prizes, such as the Grand Prix Claire Combes of the Taylor Foundation in 2007, the Prix Azart in 2005 or the Prix Charles Oulmont in 2004, which he received with honors from the jury. His work has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions in France and abroad and his work is included in several collections. He has also participated in several fairs, including JustMad (Madrid, Spain) with the gallery Loo & Lou in 2019, the Marrakech Biennale (Marrakech, Morocco) or Art Up (Lille, France) in 2016.
Born in 1970, Christophe Miralles is a Franco-Spanish artist who lives and works between Burgundy and Casablanca.
His work is nourished by various sources that go back to its origins: from his Moroccan roots, one can note some Mediterranean influences coming from two shores, which resonate and never collide with each other. Spanish painting from the Golden Age undoubtedly sealed his relationship with light and compositions: we can see in his work the influence of figures such as Velázquez, Zurbarán or El Greco.
Human figures suspended in the void haunt his canvases inviting worrying feelings and a certain nostalgia. These are depersonalized figures, devoid of identity, which remind us of Francis Bacon’s characters. The combination of simplified forms and subtle nuances in colors allows him to give an intemporal aspect to his paintings, where the material is the main subject.
Miralles creates oil paintings on paper and canvas, and uses lacquers. He brought together a series for an exhibition at Loo & Lou Gallery entitled Territoire Unique in April 2018. His works spoke of humanity, travel, and tolerance. Colors burn through his canvases, engorging the space in flames wherein the ashes slowly fall on his large black papers. He is a painter anchored in contemporary society, a territory that he hopes is unique for all. This work was complemented and nourished by the exhibition Vertige du monde by the artist Flo Arnold, presented in collaboration at the Loo & Lou Gallery’s Atelier.
He has received several artistic prizes, such as the Grand Prix Claire Combes of the Taylor Foundation in 2007, the Prix Azart in 2005 or the Prix Charles Oulmont in 2004, which he received with honors from the jury. His work has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions in France and abroad and his work is included in several collections. He has also participated in several fairs, including JustMad (Madrid, Spain) with the gallery Loo & Lou in 2019, the Marrakech Biennale (Marrakech, Morocco) or Art Up (Lille, France) in 2016.
Born in 1970, Christophe Miralles is a Franco-Spanish artist who lives and works between Burgundy and Casablanca.
His work is nourished by various sources that go back to its origins: from his Moroccan roots, one can note some Mediterranean influences coming from two shores, which resonate and never collide with each other. Spanish painting from the Golden Age undoubtedly sealed his relationship with light and compositions: we can see in his work the influence of figures such as Velázquez, Zurbarán or El Greco.
Human figures suspended in the void haunt his canvases inviting worrying feelings and a certain nostalgia. These are depersonalized figures, devoid of identity, which remind us of Francis Bacon’s characters. The combination of simplified forms and subtle nuances in colors allows him to give an intemporal aspect to his paintings, where the material is the main subject.
Miralles creates oil paintings on paper and canvas, and uses lacquers. He brought together a series for an exhibition at Loo & Lou Gallery entitled Territoire Unique in April 2018. His works spoke of humanity, travel, and tolerance. Colors burn through his canvases, engorging the space in flames wherein the ashes slowly fall on his large black papers. He is a painter anchored in contemporary society, a territory that he hopes is unique for all. This work was complemented and nourished by the exhibition Vertige du monde by the artist Flo Arnold, presented in collaboration at the Loo & Lou Gallery’s Atelier.
He has received several artistic prizes, such as the Grand Prix Claire Combes of the Taylor Foundation in 2007, the Prix Azart in 2005 or the Prix Charles Oulmont in 2004, which he received with honors from the jury. His work has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions in France and abroad and his work is included in several collections. He has also participated in several fairs, including JustMad (Madrid, Spain) with the gallery Loo & Lou in 2019, the Marrakech Biennale (Marrakech, Morocco) or Art Up (Lille, France) in 2016.
When discovering the works of Simon Laveuve, one is tempted to think back to Dubuffet’s quip that art “is always where you least expect it”. After decades of contemporary art displaying the ostentatious nature of its monumental creations in art venues built to the (dis)measure of their ever more imposing frames, we are witnessing the emergence of a new aesthetic trend that turns this quest for gigantism on its head, extolling the virtues of the miniature, a taste for the minuscule, attention to detail, and the reverie of intimate spaces. Simon Laveuve is certainly at the forefront of this desire to rediscover a more human scale of creation, even if it’s 1/35, in a closeness that recaptures the wonder of childhood. In concrete terms, the artist born in 1988 in the Paris suburbs creates miniature sculptures of chimerical architectures. From old graffiti-strewn sheds and ramshackle huts to overgrown turrets, trash-colored lighthouses, improbably levitating ships, dilapidated platforms, buoys and Lilliputian rafts, Simon Laveuve’s model sculptures present an almost surreal inventory of improbable habitats that have nothing to envy the architectural follies of Richard Greaves or the Palais du Facteur Cheval.
Belonging to a generation aware that we are living against a backdrop of widespread ecological crisis in a world on borrowed time, haunted by the spectre of a post-apocalyptic era, he explores the possibilities of surviving by living poetically in remote or inhospitable places. He thus imagines a world filled with “anachitectures” that defy the norms and principles of urban construction, like so many unusual shelters in the form of robinsonnades serving as refuges for the survivors of the future. Like many artists born in the concrete of the great post-war urbanization projects embodying the brutalist architecture of the first half of the 20th century, Simon Laveuve questions the future of these urban spaces, often devastated by industrial desertization, and frequently appearing as non-places virtually devoid of humanity – future Territories of Waste, veritable “wastelands” punctuated by dilapidated shelters. By offering a veritable manifesto of aesthetic savoir-vivre in the ruins of capitalism, the artist in no way subscribes to the collapsological nihilism of some. In fact, his visual universe has nothing to do with an anguished, gloomy dystopia, but rather bears witness to an act of resistance that appeals to the poetry of play and the virtues of the marvellous. From this point of view, the choice of miniature, far from signifying a kind of resigned closure, seems rather to be the royal road to the regeneration of our vanishing imaginations. Whereas the gigantism of contemporary installations, whose deleterious impact on our potential for aesthetic reverie Annie Lebrun has never ceased to criticize, often plunges the viewer into a state of prostrate awe, miniaturized space turns its back on these canons by opposing them with other values: the humility of the artistic gesture rather than grandiloquence; a close-up view of the art object rather than a distant, hurried discovery; the patience of attention in preference to frantic zapping; the cult of secrecy, of hiding, rather than exhibitionist, expensive staging.
What’s more, as Bachelard points out: “The minuscule, the narrow door if there ever was one, opens up a world. The detail of a thing can be the sign of a new world, a world which, like all worlds, contains the attributes of greatness. The miniature is one of the lodgings of greatness. By incorporating tiny tire swings, rope ladders, furniture, works of art, wooden doors punctuated with scribbled messages and a variety of utilitarian objects into his unusual buildings, each object-miniature perfectly combines the hyperrealism of meticulously reproduced detail with the fantasy of a reality in a new, dreamlike dimension. The abundantly colored, Lilliputian models can sometimes evoke the kitschy world of “chinoiseries” in Asian neighborhoods, the atmosphere of Caro & Jeunet’s film sets, as well as that of SF or singular architectures, as the artist particularly appreciates the blending of genres and cultures.
Finally, Simon Laveuve’s approach is a hymn to manual, self-taught creation; fully in keeping with a “modest art”, if not “poor”. Faced with excessive consumerist waste, the artist resorts to the systematic recovery of objects that he skilfully recycles in his constructions, following the example of the tin cans he makes abundant use of. By hijacking this emblematic object of consumerism, which Warhol elevated to the status of Pop Art icon, Simon Laveuve rediscovers the founding gesture of an aesthetic of play whose origin Walter Benjamin attributed to the genius of childhood. Aren’t children irresistibly drawn to the waste products of construction, gardening and domestic work? With these waste products, which they know how to divert wonderfully, don’t they give shape to their own world of things, a little world within the big one, just by themselves? Simon Laveuve draws on the childhood of art that Claude Lévi-Strauss observed survives into adulthood in the “wild thought” of the handyman, quick to use whatever he can get his hands on to realize his project. The famous anthropologist also saw in the scale model, “always and everywhere, the very type of work of art”.
La nuit descend, 2024, Oil on canvas, 180 x 140 cm
Météores, 2024, Oil on canvas, 180 x 140 cm
Ombilic, 2024, Oil on canvas, 180 x 140 cm
Body’s law
Who are they, these characters who stand out less than they seem to extract themselves, temporarily, from a foggy, heavy, enveloping substance – sticky like clay, floating like the clouds padding distant star clusters? Who are these characters watching us? A poorly posed question, with approximate terms. No “who”, no “they”, even less “characters” in Frantz Metzger’s paintings. Just “figures”. And their indistinct faces, eclipsed or eaten by who knows what leprous fog, removed from the laborious demands of expressive and physiognomic exactitude, are certainly not “looking” at us. Frantz Metzger draws titles and stimuli from Dante, Hölderlin and Pascal. At the same time, however, and without paradox, Metzger’s painting is fiercely anti-literary: he makes no pretensions to the “psychology of characters, these living beings without entrails” (Valéry).
The fine craftsmanship that went into shaping these bodies, these volumes obtained through the skilful, colorist grace of the infinite modulation of grays (the science of dosing and shifting light-whites and brown opacities) – this fine craftsmanship never rings hollow. Otherwise, Zoran Music, Baselitz, even Bacon (who played no small part in shaping Frantz Metzger’s temperament as a painter) would be empty. That doesn’t sound hollow – it sounds full. What fills these literally disfigured bodies?
Let’s take a look at the works on paper: kneading of silhouettes, irregular kneading of contours (Schiele is undoubtedly not far off), squirts, splashes, effusions. It’s suffering: aching flesh. Back to the painting: Crucified’s lividity, the body’s vessel in the process of dissolving. Grey-white, semi-solid masses of flesh, of which we might well say what Fritz Zorn wrote, with his appalling lucidity, of his cancer: “It was as if all the tears I hadn’t been able – and hadn’t wanted – to shed in my life had gathered in my neck to form this tumour”. But there are these couples too. Jouissance, supplice, what’s the difference, not just because one, as we’ve been told often enough, is the flip side of the other – but because this painting is purely corporeal, purely sensorial. And that the location of the cursor (agony or orgasm) matters less than the sensitive alterations of the affected subject. The way his flesh dissolves, melts, or radiates and persists. In any case, these bodies only half belong to themselves. They get stuck, entangled in the depths. They sometimes hesitate on the “edge” (Frantz Metzger likes the word and the idea) of animal life. As if badly awakened from the sleep of consciousness proper to primordial existence. But Metzger is less interested in primordial existence for its own sake than in the regressions and mutations it determines. For the impulses and thrusts that bring us back to it or pull us out of it. For the “forces that work reality” (Artaud). And maintain its permanent motion, its moving inconstancy. The body is, as we understand from this work, the best witness to this.
See the tree, feel the sovereign plant, transcribe the jolts of its dense and fibrous matter… Dedicated to the abstract evocation of the landscape, the large paintings by Pierre-Luc Poujol express a feeling of communion with the fertile life that populates the depths of the forest, in the heart of a chaos of trees spotted by light that filters through their shady foliage. The motif of the tree in fact fertilizes all its production, and the magma matrix that presides over all his achievements, the artist walks variations in explorations, shaping a universe with thousand ramifications. Pierre-Luc Poujol is committed to the preservation of the environment and designs his practice in a deep respect for life, tree branches, vegetable ashes, wood charcoal, allowing him a more intimate connection with his subject. Through the accumulation of gestures and traces involving the body and putting the eye in motion, he makes the plant spring out and deploys moving environments whose multiple tones are bathed in luminous vibrations with certain force. Like dripping, his sensual approach to the medium is blossoming in soft waves whose nervous accents, as so many contained deflagrations, make the pictorial space resonate. A rhythm is born from this intensity and the layout of what could be trunks, branches and other foliage play thus a partition where the power of nature are expressed, as well as the softness of the shadow.
Cabinet de curiosités contemporain Jonathan F. Kugel – Brussels Loo & Lou Gallery – Haut Marais 19.09 – 09.11.24
Exhibition’s view at Cabinet de curiosités contemporain Jonathan F. Kugel, 2024
Exhibition’s view at Cabinet de curiosités contemporain Jonathan F. Kugel, 2024
Exhibition’s view at Cabinet de curiosités contemporain Jonathan F. Kugel, 2024
Exhibition’s view at Cabinet de curiosités contemporain Jonathan F. Kugel, 2024
Exhibition’s view at Cabinet de curiosités contemporain Jonathan F. Kugel, 2024
Exhibition’s view at Cabinet de curiosités contemporain Jonathan F. Kugel, 2024
Exhibition Les Passions Jonathan F. Kugel, Cabinet de curiosités contemporain In collaboration with Loo & Lou Gallery From September 19 to November 9, 2024
Signature of the monography by Joël Person During Brussels Art Square Jonathan F. Kugel, Cabinet de curiosités contemporain Saturday September 21, from 2.30 to 6 pm
How many of us still read newspapers in paper format? In this 21st century, where digital versions are making inescapable progress, Andrew Ntshabele, visual artist, painter and newspaper collector, pays homage to the printed press by literally incorporating it into his work through the sections of text and articles that form the entire background of his paintings and towards which his characters are turned: anonymous individuals, fathers and mothers, but above all children, boys and girls holding hands and seemingly moving forward in this textual landscape of facts and events. But isn’t this image of past and present news rather a metaphor for a world in which the ability to be informed has become essential if we are to be actors in our own future? Knowing how to read and write remains a major preoccupation in Africa, as on other continents, particularly for families with very low incomes, whose dearest wish is that their children should be able to go to school and learn. In South Africa, education remains the key to individual success and collective social well-being.
Newspaper pages are just another visual element in the urban environment for those who can’t decipher them. In Andrew Ntshabele’s work, they constitute a “contextual” landscape, intelligible to some, but abstract to those who cannot read. The ordinary, everyday characters he chooses to depict seem to oppose the density of the texts. Their vitality, expressed through dance or the most common acts: shopping, going to school, etc., contrasts with the formatting of the titles and paragraphs, while the relative austerity of the texts and photos is matched by the diversity and freshness of the patterns and colors of the clothes. Alone or in groups, the characters move towards an infinite textuality, creating an effect of depth and a form of perspective in which we ourselves, the viewers of the painting, participate since we are led to look at, if not read, the texts that the characters see. In this way, Andrew Ntshabele invites us to share his characters’ reading of the history of events in the making, with all its upheavals and societal challenges. Like them, we become aware that we are witnesses, if not actors.
L’Atelier Loo&Lou takes its place and becomes, for the duration of an exhibition, the Salon Loo&Lou. Designed to resemble an apartment living room with artworks on the walls, it combines the heterogeneous character of many collectors’ interiors with a certain comfort.
Here, rather than a curatorial homogeneity, the chosen works resonate with a singularity in the technique or mediums used by the artists, and a color palette mixing blacks and whites.
The reason for this new exhibition format is a desire, a necessity, to bring to life creations that had previously lain dormant in Loo&Lou’s storerooms.
The sofa, installed in the space so as to embrace the entire exhibition with a single glance, allows visitors to prolong their visit, creating the conditions for a more complete understanding of the works on display, or simply for a state of contemplation…
It’s a mystery that unrolls its question marks in the ordinary train of our existences, and which is celebrated in Tana Borissova’s studio. It’s a tense mystery, exasperating for the mind; an exhilarating mystery, a source of inexhaustible and lively joy for the other faculties – spiritual and sensory alike.
In a word: how does matter and its inert properties (extent, hardness or plastic docility, consistency or tenuity) give rise to life? Or, better put: how does matter, which is subject to the necessities of physical laws, awaken to life – does it think – feel – escape the fallout of gravity? These passengers on my subway line, these colors on Tana Borissova’s canvases: why don’t they all boil down to the mere assembly of molecules, tendons and pigments that make them up? The answer, if there is one, doesn’t lie with us. But there’s nothing to stop us, like and with Tana Borissova, getting to the heart of the mystery.
Here is a tree: a section of bark and wood; here are colors (blues more or less saturated with light, ochres more or less approaching the point of incandescence and fusion); here are the paintings in the exhibition. And “here” is not enough; there’s always more to see than “here”.
The heart of things: where the superficial uniformity of tissue, dermis and bark is broken, where there is a complication of forms, a shimmer of nuances, indefinitely gazable, caressable, questionable. Where organic matter takes on the variety of the living. In Tana Borissova’s work, for example, the infinite cartography of inner landscapes, which, like the worlds sheltered by drops of river water, draw the topography (the geology, the geography, we don’t really know how to put it) of the plant being that the paintings delve into and repress.
The heart of things: where art seeks out the raw components whose assembly gives rise to life. These very components are revealed by Tana Borissova’s chromatic variations, indefinitely flexible but always connected to the fourfold core of all things, always suggestive of the tones of the four elements: earth, water, fire and sky hues.
Tana Borissova is in the tradition of the great “decomposers” – of those who, with light, earth and rock, can see only in terms of multiplicity – whether Turner, of course, or Giuseppe De Nittis at Vesuvius, or Courbet at the Caverne des Géants, or Dora Maar’s landscapes.
I’ll never be another traveler in the metro, but I can know him; I’ll never be another painting by Tana Borissova, but its currents, its flows, carry me away; I’m caught up in the momentum of this surge, in the impetuosity of life. Thrusts, jets: this is the dynamic impression made by Tana Borissova’s canvases. Vital breath, heartbeat, the flow of blood in the arteries, sap in plants, the flow of time…
It’s all about movement and emotion. For Tana Borissova’s tree, like her painting, feels, senses. It’s a magnificent mystery, and all that’s left to do is to be silent. And to look.
Painting the unspeakable under the radiant sunshine of the Mediterranean coast. Painting the unspeakable, by night, while humming, by day, Le Tourbillon de la vie, the song written for François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. “L’indicible” is how Serge Rezvani defines his visceral painting in the sunny pages of his autobiographical novel Beauté, j’écris ton nom. It’s a novel that seeks to rediscover the source of the earthy, fiery pigments with which he has spent his entire life, digging into his thick jute canvases. Serge Rezvani, whose very life, with its wartime terrors, its Edenic lights and its extraordinary resonance with the unfolding of historical time, surpasses any narrative. Writer, musician, poet, but above all a painter, which is less well known.
From an early age, he scribbled in the short-lived petticoats of an extravagant and terribly ill mother, who finally abandoned him on the eve of the declaration of war in 1939, to die in the morbid solitude of the Warsaw ghetto. The infinite trauma of the eternally absent woman is embodied in his paintings in the form of a violent “abstraction” – even if he refutes the term – of a distant, unknown maternal death. In adolescence, the young man “went into painting” – as he put it – furiously, obsessively. A survivor’s gesture. From the depths of scattered glimmers that seem to emerge from an underground world, he draws out the demons of an unattached, demolished, bruised childhood. His companions in misfortune were the painters Jacques Lanzmann and Pierre Dmitrienko, and the English sculptor Raymond Mason, with whom he shared a daily life of misery, first at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he found refuge, then in a vast bourgeois house with no heating, where the small group of artists dreamed of themselves as the new avant-garde of the immediate post-war period. They were the young abstract artists of the Ecole de Paris, also known as the “Les mains éblouies” collective, exhibited by Aimé Maeght. Around them gravitated Raymond Queneau, Boris Vian, Modigliani, Picasso and even Paul Eluard, who entrusted the young Rezvani with the engraving illustration of one of his Apollonian poems.
For in the deep, dark mysteries of this era, with its taste of eschatological utopia, the dazzling pleasure of love and appeasement seep through. For Rezvani, it was Lula, the goddess of his life, whose daily life he shared for 50 years in a house tucked away in the Maures mountains. Their paradise. He painted tirelessly, sometimes tempted to destroy his canvases. Lula stopped him. In 1962, the year of the release of Jules et Jim, his Effigies appeared, dark, immobile, totemic heaps with sculptural angles, seeming visions of a lost ancestral femininity, imbued with this new labyrinthine, enigmatic abstraction that he seems to share with Serge Poliakoff and Nicolas de Staël, his elders. Playing with overlaps and dark projections sprouting from the painting’s interiority, they seem to have emerged from distant sub-layers, as if from a secret straitjacket, an ebony chrysalis with primitive accents.
Rarely shown, some unpublished and dormant for years, these mute fetishes are here resurrected alongside Repentances, a series produced thirty years later, in more vibrant shades of blood-red and violet, evoking the slender nuances of Tintoretto. Set in complex compositions of occult windows and doors, these cloisonné-meshed canvases seem to trace the convoluted network of a spaceship hull or cryptic palace. They also evoke a resurgence-tribute to Rembrandt’s Flayed Ox, and by correlation, in a pictorial lexicon closer to our painter, to that of Soutine. There’s a palpitation that’s contained, buried, that of the canvases created in the wake of the Effigies, which the artist has now undertaken to cover. The latter were full of abysses of flesh, tangles of viscera, mazes of weightless shreds. More tortured and cavernous, and even monstrous in some cases – in the sense that they revealed a buried and traumatized part of intimacy, like a bodily externality, an alienation, that only painting, this inexplicable incarnation of the artist’s soul in the field of the world, has the power to reveal. Without words. Because words, just after the war, were no longer enough. Les Repentirs thus had the effect of appeasement, or repentance, when the painter’s gesture was replayed. After them, Rezvani stopped painting for almost 30 years, with a few exceptions, to devote himself to writing.
Yet while his writings exude tenderness and humor, though invariably marked by a radicalism that characterizes each of his artistic expressions, his paintings are the exact opposite. Driven by a quest for the unrepresentable. A quest that never ceases to haunt him, even in his later Blanches series (2000s), constructed like woodcuts. More hieroglyphic, seeming to unite the tachist tenderness of a Tapies and the scriptural reveries of a Chillida, they still dig the furrow of a motif partitioned by secret doors crossed by apparitions, behind which lies the unknown. The painting? That “palpable space of the painting as a support for the informable”, as the artist’s luminous pen puts it.
On old papers with an outdated appearance – stamped envelopes, road maps, playing cards – Mark Powell (1980, England) draws a whole gallery of portraits using a ballpoint pen whose expressive power captivates the eye with force and authority. Here, the artist takes care to depict the entirety of the epidermal contours of his subjects – unknown faces most often encountered in the street – seemingly emphasizing their truly parchment-like bodily texture: wrinkles dig furrows right into the skin, imprinting the body with the traces of memory and the marks of time, the very same ones that shape landscapes and geological soils. Geographical inscriptions become embodied and lodged in anatomical details: faded with the background and then no longer distinct from it, the human face becomes a palimpsest, Mark Powell then generating a new way of viewing in his works. The skin becomes a surface on its own: leveraged only to convey interiority, the artist strives to reveal its enigmatic part, its whole density. This one seems to be driven by past wanderings – personal trajectories, cultural journeys – where intimacy and history blend without ever disturbing each other. Far from the images of perfection, the face then appears like an open book where the gradual curve of the dermis and skin tones inform about the depths of memory, as well as its sedimentation.
Leaving the studio, a lingering, ambiguous sensation. The pleasant imprint of a luminous, colorful universe. Flowers of acrylic and oil pastel. Laces of color. Attractive pinks, blues, greens, yellows and bright reds. Sunshine. It diffuses into the soul and body. Sweet, lively, boundless, like love radiating from a child’s imagination. And at the same time, the sensation of a shadow covering everything. Cold memories down my back. A black wall built between the eye and the heart. It freezes. It keeps you at a distance. It doesn’t seduce. A disturbing, angular charcoal line. A fossilized white presence, two gaps to plunge into.
That’s where SylC’s universe is headed. Right on the edge of flight and bottomless fall. Revealing what lies beneath. He is the bird and the death mask. One and the other mingled. As the taste of heaven and earth mingle in our mouths.
Intuitive, SylC’s art explores the unknown fire we carry inside. Don’t look for ultimate truth or fixed meanings. From painting to drawing to sculpture, his art is all about ambivalence and clashes of polarities, breaks and sutures. Aesthetics of fragment and hybridization, embodying the facets of life and interiority. Between the power of life and fragility, freedom and hindrance, desire and fear.
SylC’s hybrid universe is above all characterized by an ambiguous realism that navigates between reality and imagination, observation and fantasy. Of course, there’s a certain taste for the classical realism of the Flemish and Italian Renaissance in his work. An attraction to the abundance of nature, to anatomical detail, to the transparency of skin and its light. But we could also speak of a Baroque, Surrealist or Expressionist sensibility: non-finishes and the vagaries of matter, anatomical oddities, an imaginary world populated by mythical creatures, Narcissus, Centaurs and other hybrid bestials.
The most striking works are those that do not seek seduction, and that free themselves from the mimesis of the image. Where the unfinished and the imprecise remain. Where the flow of matter instinctively springs forth, through which the eye may or may not reconstruct a form. When fragments of legs sprout from a black drop. When the presence of a very realistic piece of face floats in a barely sketched shapeless mass. When the sharp, precise line suddenly stops, drawing only armless bodies, unfinished hands and eyeless faces. When the softness of round, flowing forms cohabits with the dry hardness of angular line. And when realistic beauty gives birth to all manner of monsters and other expressionist deformations. When the white reserve proliferates and says nothing but its great despairing emptiness.
Osmosis, Otherness, With or without rider, Reflet(s): in SylC’s universe, the question of identity predominates and always arises in an unconscious, ambivalent way. One body walking with another. A body that reflects another. A body that carries another. A body that grafts itself onto and merges with another. A shapeless shadow floating in the air. What do we see in these figures? An indestructible bond, family love, amorous fusion? Or hindrance, dependence? Are they presences or losses, mourning? Survivals of recumbents and Pietas grafted onto real models? What do we see in these figures? A beast, an animal? A child, an adult? An angel, a demon? Are they vibrant comets, eternal flowers, odes to life? Or are they carriers of death, with their half-open mouths and black orbits? Are they present, beating in the depths of our bellies, or remnants of a past lost in our heads?
No one knows what’s being represented.
Us and the others or the other “I ” inside us?
We and our ghostly memories that we carry in our bodies, with a thousand beliefs and a thousand disillusions. We and our multiple lives, which turn our souls into ashes, where new fires are constantly rekindled.
What does it represent, SylC? Perhaps the in-between. That mysterious passage through which we all pass, on the edge of which something always comes to an end and something new begins. Just like the ambivalent nature that takes shape in our works. Here, an ode to life, nourishing, fertile nature. A vast expanse of water in which our reflection is reflected, giving birth to the form of the living while at the same time making it disappear, caught up in its bottomless mirror. There, incandescent light beyond a verdant forest, whose glowing beauty we don’t know whether will be a heavenly refuge or an apocalyptic end.
Often there’s a mask. Here sometimes emerges from a black envelope, long-beaked and menacing. Or a skull face with fixed eye sockets. Here, often, a fragile circle encircles the white face. Like Ophelia’s face on the surface of the water. Like those ancient masks molded on the faces of the dead, a plaster spectre floating in the void.
The mask is what remains and what has passed. What was and what will be. The mask is what we see and what’s behind it. It’s the mask of death, but also, and above all, of metamorphosis. Like the masks of those strange, hybrid gods with horse or dog heads who have emerged from distant magical rituals. Like the mask of all the winged beings we carry within us. Beings of passage. From an imaginary beyond the grave, endlessly reborn in our heads. Leaving reality behind to help us explore other worlds. To open doors within us, to all those other “I “s that inhabit us. Children, adults, old people. Ageless beings in constant evolution. In whose arms we merge matter and spirit, joy and sorrow, inside and outside. A taste of heaven and earth.
We’re just firebirds in black masks.
It’s up to us to see through it. Otherwise. Something else.
By giving their exhibition the title of Delacroix’s phrase “Mon Maroc, je croyais rêver” (“My Morocco, I thought I was dreaming”), Flo Arnold and Christophe Miralles are in no way demonstrating an outdated, anachronistic orientalism; rather, they are asserting the need for art to always return to the power of rapture that seized the colorist of genius on his discovery of the port of Tangier.
If the artist couple are among the many foreigners who have made Morocco their adopted country, they are not only paying homage to a land that can pride itself on having inspired so many illustrious painters, from Eugène Delacroix to Henri Matisse, Majorelle and other orientalists, it also symbolizes the idea of a creative process based on encounters and nomadic journeys, creolization and hybridization of influences, far removed from a conception of the work rooted in a patriotic and narrow-minded genealogy.
The exhibition at Loo & Lou Gallery, with its deliberately rhapsodic scenography in which the works criss-cross each other, playing on their differences and betting more on the effects of telescoping and the unexpected than on any unity of style and purpose, helps to underline the mix of genres characteristic of the “aesthetics of the impure” that characterizes the confrontation of these two creations, and more generally the art of our time. While the painter exalts a virtuoso superimposition of varied colors, whose subtle modulations irradiate his canvases with a rare sensuality, don’t Flo Arnold’s works favor paper textures whose shades of white are only weighted by the greenish reflection produced by the oxidation of the brass structures of his installations, or a few rare shades of his imaginary maps?
What’s more, while Flo Arnold’s organic installations seem carried away by an aerial power that goes beyond the specific framework of each of the mediums traditionally devolved to the fine arts system, the artist appropriating with delight the gestures of the painter and sculptor, to the point of enlisting them in a choreography on the bangs of architecture, Christophe Miralles’ paintings never cease to deepen the singularity of the pictorial fact alone. A marriage of fire and earth, the two works complement each other in their strange dissimilarity.
Indeed, while Christophe Miralles’ painting focuses on the human figure alone, it never ceases to thwart its factual and anecdotal representation, to the benefit of a plastic exploration with bewitching chromatic accents (Confluence), going so far as to make, like Bacon, “from a mouth a Sahara”, all the while walking with the memory of Goya’s work, which greatly inspired the artist in his early days. And don’t some of Flo Arnold’s works, with their polymorphous volumes and elusive shapes, evoke that witch-like aesthetic whose vitality of becoming was praised by Deleuze? In this respect, the installation Le sens des Mondes perfectly encapsulates the surprising plasticity of the Franco-Moroccan artist’s work, taking up only part of the structure of a larger whole, recently exhibited at the Festival international Constellations in Metz. Far from losing its enchanting power, the boat suspended by ropes between the picture rail and the gallery floor pours out a stream of opalescent forms, magnified by the backlighting and sound system, plunging the viewer into a Rmbaldian poetic narcosis. Is my gaze not drawn into the enveloping foam “aux neiges éblouies” (with dazzling snows), alongside the exalted lyricism of verses from “Le Bateau ivre” (The Drunken Boat)?
Unhierarchical, focused and elusive, Flo Arnold’s works are rhizomes of surprising spontaneity. Using white water-repellent paper glued to brass frames, the artist can give her pieces any dimensions they wish, always cutting or adding new modules as her projects dictate. The polysemic richness of this art form is undoubtedly linked to the designer’s background, whose childhood was imbued by her travels in Africa, and still seems enlivened by the omnipresence of lush vegetation, the importance of a whole set of pre-signifying semiologies – dances, rites, signs marked on the body, fabrics…
In this sense, the artist frees herself from cultural boundaries and the frameworks of each of the arts she revisits with total freedom – drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture… Don’t her installations end up playing with urban space during the Nuits Blanches, creating a kind of performance that has nothing to envy to the enchantment of Eva Jospin’s forests, or Christo’s wrappings?
What comes to dominate Flo Arnold’s plastic and Christophe Miralles’ pictorial space is a world of curves, inflections, circles, spirals and colored volutes. So many formal characteristics that testify to the same effort to construct the work as a “space of happy intimacy”, to use Bachelard’s beautiful expression. The art of this artistic couple is in no way reducible to decoration or mere retinal pleasure.
He makes visible an intensive inner space and invites us to cultivate it as an intimate cell…
Cedric Le Corf’s second Paris Solo Show at Loo&Lou Gallery was eagerly awaited. In 2020, the public discovered the work of this young artist of German and Breton origins, whose powerful, baroque sculptures, in which porcelain was interwoven with wood, showed great promise. Born of his experience in Madrid at Casa Velasquez, Cedric Le Corf’s new works put aside the use of porcelain to focus on the luminous and colorful possibilities of painted wood.
With these new sculptures and high-reliefs in polychromed wood, Cedric Le Corf explores the expressiveness of form, and the theatricality of color and light. Drawing on a vast imaginary museum that stretches from North to South, creating astonishing explosions, this research is imbued with a singular vibrancy. Of course, there’s the Spanish Baroque taste for tragedy, charged with the eloquence of chiaroscuro and mastery of color, as seen in the painted sculptures with waxy pulpits or glazed ceramics by Juan De Juni or Alonso Berruguete. But in this way of attacking wood and working with color, there is also the survival of a German tradition. This tradition ranges from the Rhenish heritage of the polychrome wood schools and the crude realism of Dürer and Grünewald, to the powerful German Expressionism of Baselitz and Lüpertz, whose language of tension and laceration left its mark on the artist during his time in Berlin.
Whereas yesterday’s sculptures focused on the tragic representation of the body, whether human or animal, butchered, quartered and recomposed, today’s new pieces focus on the theme of forest and light. They stem from childhood memories, echoes of the forest where Cedric Le Corf grew up in Germany. But they also stem from more recent observations, during walks in the Celtic lands where the artist now lives again, in the Scorff valley in Morbihan. Immersed in the forest. This is where Cedric Le Corf chooses his wood. Maple, chestnut, oak, eucalyptus, cherry. Whether painted or left untreated, the wood is always soft enough to be worked quickly, following the spontaneous flow of ideas and sensations felt by the artist. Stimuli abound in this everyday environment steeped in history, in the heart of vibrant nature.
Nearby are Porz a maro (the gates of death) and Devil’s Rock, where the ocean plays its marine ode, turning smooth rock into a relief in its own right. And then there’s the timeless soul of the land. Here, the remains of an Iron Age village. Here, medieval gems. Like the Eglise Notre-Dame de Kernascleden, with its colorful Flamboyant Gothic vaulting, the whirling of Hell and its danse macabre. Like the chapel of Sainte-Barbe, a favorite of the artist’s, with its keystones, tinderboxes and sculpted beams, transformed into monstrous Gothic creatures.
Of course, the raw, archaic, inhabited and powerfully expressive aspect of this pervasive context, which nourished the works, is also present. We feel the textures and smells, like green, damp moss, the taste of mushrooms or the grainy hardness of low stone walls. The light vibrates through the leaves and the trees shimmer in the puddles. You can hear the wind and the swirls of the sea banging against the large rocks. A sea field found in some of the engravings, drypoint on metal, exhibited alongside the reliefs and sculptures. We listen to the passage of time, to the rhythm of deer footprints or fox skulls embedded in the earth. Like a hollow path, Cedric’s work is all light and dark. Intensely dramatic, traversed by powerful vital and telluric forces, it plunges us into the beauty of the dark. Crossing a dark forest, pierced by a trickle of light. Just enough for rebirth.
Amélie Adamo, Author, Art critic and independant curator, Paris, July 2023
It’s difficult, if not impossible, not to be moved, immediately and literally, by Joel Person’s drawn work, so much so that his charcoal blacks, applied with force or delicacy to his various media, seem to come to meet us to tell us about the world around him, the universes that fascinate him.
Today, this graphic rendezvous by the renowned author of sensitive horses, whose material reminds us of the precious heliogravure-printed English editions of the 20s, plunges us into a magma of images whose simple ambition is to make our eyes shine, our ears throb and our hearts beat.
Les Bruits du Monde, what a formula! Like the title chosen over thirty years ago by Peter Greenaway for his superb exhibition at the Louvre entitled Le Bruit des Nuages (The Noise of Clouds), the title of Joel Person’s Images is intended to reflect a completely different kind of sky.
Meeting in « Kaleidoscopie Chorus Achromata »*
In the studio, over a cup of coffee, I come face to face with the artist as draughtsman, but above all in front of a large white wall on which, with the touch of a finger, subjects of all kinds cohabit. Unfinished or impeccably finished (implacable?), his drawings have been inspired by various databases. The creative spirit is set in motion.
The overall effect is really striking.
You don’t know where to look…
It’s like being in a TV surveillance booth, responsible for a multitude of images that you have to see and then scrupulously decipher.
This masterful kaleidoscope leaves no doubt as to the quality of the artist’s workmanship.
A further paradox is that this graphic ensemble emanates a sort of muted sonority. Before our very eyes, we feel the sensation of a crackling sound, preparing us, without a moment’s hesitation, to feel our own emotions.
Although colorless, the source of emotions according to the ancients, drawing nonetheless has that uncanny ability to speak to the soul of the layman who ventures into sacred land shaded in black. Joel Person’s pencil strokes, like so many lines, form his personal alphabet, with which he builds his narratives, composes his stories. What seduces us sometimes also disconcerts us. How do you go from an overtly violent street scene to a sublime portrait of a thoroughbred Arabian stallion? Any answer to this question is futile. The best thing to do is not to sulk in pleasure, but to take these plural images as they come, in good company, the company that, thanks to the artist’s talent, allows us to open our eyes and appreciate…his new Sounds of the World.
If Person is an artist in the literal sense
Joel is an artist in the figurative sense.
– Edwart Vignot, Art historian
« Kaleidoscopie Chorus Achromata »* neologism specially coined to describe part of Joel Person’s artistic work: relating to a diversity of things, people, multiple situations without color…
Charcoal: in choosing this title for her new exhibition at Loo & Lou Gallery, Lydie Arickx is not only referring to the material that inspired some of the works on display, but also to a deeper interweaving of memories that seems to be woven together like the past sediments of her own life. Doesn’t coal refer to that dark country dotted with slag heaps, peopled with memories of mines and corons, particularly in the north of France, where his family still has deep ties? Doesn’t it also evoke images of shameful atavism, child labor and the “black faces” of Germinal, silicosis, the cries of miners’ wives and the blasts of firedamp? Hasn’t it served as fuel for a whole imaginary world of social revolt, that of a people who “thunder in their crater”, rising up like an underground force, and will soon shatter the earth? By summoning this ore laden with all these fragments of human and plant life – coal being no more than an extract of fossilized trees and plants compressed in the viscous night of this region’s subsoils – Lydie Arickx also continues her exploration of the arborescence of the living, while drawing on the mystical depths of Flemish painting.
By going to the coalface, Lydie Arickx is not afraid of dealing with a material that is not only tainted by the dirt of anthracite, but also demonized by its responsibility for global warming. The artist, no stranger to the art of systematic bricolage, even confides her wonder at this new ingredient likely to enrich her laboratory of plastic experimentation. Lydie Arickx has long been a devotee of “wild thought”, which Claude Lévi-Strauss described as “the inscription, in the pictorial world, of techniques considered inadequate, unacceptable and unprofessional”. Hasn’t she always resorted to the most unorthodox materials, totally alien to the rules of academic painting?
It was in an impromptu way, using its medicinal virtues, that she discovered the full aesthetic potential of this vegetable charcoal. By mixing it with water, it diffuses on contact with the paper and spreads out in a multitude of unexpected graphic gesticulations, drawing a venous network with gnarled ramifications that are as organic as they are magical.
Here, the artist finds a new way to realize the dream of an informal expressionism: that of a material without form, without framework and without corset; similar to the lianascence of certain Caribbean plants, whose extreme versatility lends itself to all transformations and deformations, indefinitely malleable. Lydie Arickx enriches this substance, sometimes mixing it with pigments and acrylic resin.
Like a Füssli watercolor revisited by the “turbulent infinity” of Henri Michaux’s mescaline drawings, evanescent and tenuous silhouettes fade in and out of view, lending the works the in-between quality of dream and fantasy. With its depth of black and remarkable matte finish, doesn’t this charcoal evoke that “work in black” that would have made the greatest alchemists dream? Doesn’t it embody the power to transmute values, bringing beauty out of the dark, impure depths of the vilest materials? By restoring to the great flow of life the most sordid and apparently repugnant parts of existence, Lydie Arickx’s art seems to be permeated by a song of desire that is reminiscent of the lyricism of certain pages by Henri Miller: “I love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, (…) all the pus and filth that as it flows purifies itself, everything that loses the sense of its origin, everything that travels the great circuit towards death and dissolution. “
Hence, no doubt, this tendency to “add another layer”, with this yellow face in particular, with its impasto of materials giving the painting the appearance of a veritable “bas-relief” of “material” glory. So, by perpetually enriching the variety of materials in her plastic vocabulary, isn’t the artist inventing a language open to the gaping holes of life, in the same way that Hugo drew the illuminations of his poetry from the “Mouth of Shadow”? Because for the painter, as for the poet, isn’t it above all a matter of knowing how to “contemplate”? Less than a creator of forms, the artist becomes a revelator, a “tool” for revealing the virtual properties of a material. Just as a child marvels at seeing his or her own drawing, so is he or she astonished by the emergence of forms forever in the making? Lydie Arickx’s works are fully part of an aesthetic of play. To appreciate them, we should no doubt draw inspiration from the famous passage in Leonardo’s Notebooks entitled “A way of stimulating and awakening the intellect for various inventions”, and the “walls smeared with stains” from which “an infinity of things are born that you will be able to reduce to distinct and well-conceived forms”. Thus, from limbo, and from the lineaments of a wash, a couple of embracing figures seem to tenderly form as the ink meanders. By placing Lydie Arickx’s work under the Duchampian banner, could we not say, at last, that in this exhibition, “it is (also) the viewers who make the painting”?
A young woman is swaddled in a chrysalis, ready to hatch into a new femininity. Her carefully sculpted, calm face exudes a poetic quality that exists on the edge of death and rebirth. She will soon emerge into an uncertain land that offers dreams and utopias. Is she Ophelia from the future? Plastic cocoons her body, suggesting the advent of new genetic processes that will seal our long descendance from Homo Sapiens.
“Is it science fiction? No, it is a waiting room from the future”, Elisabeth Daynès answers. The artist, who works with paleogeneticists, anthropologists and biologists, is known for the faces and bodies of cavemen she recreates for museums and prehistoric sites. Within Evolution, a Neanderthal looks at us with irony, his arms crossed, wondering what we inherited from our ancestors and what generational abyss we are headed towards. A curious, hyper-realistically sculpted man asks himself the same question, as he peers into a relief of a flayed face through the prism of Alioscopy technology. A worrying otherworldliness manifests from this monstrous double of ourselves.
Monsters seem to have infiltrated the physical preoccupations of our time, haunted by the spectre of genetics and hybridization, for better or for worse. It cannot be mere coincidence that questions of gender, sexuality, and identity are raised at a time when social networks are turning human bodies into guinea pigs, ready to mutate in the name of the diktat of the beauty. Is there a genetic nightmare in sight? Probably…
Daynès speculates that we will soon be birthed from small hulls, resembling vulvas, that grow on charred trees. After visiting several research laboratories working on synthetic skin, she began questioning the scientific process of grafting. Her works emulate a hybridization of the living, and suggest augmented, artificial properties that interfere in the evolution of species. “This is a crazy time to be living in, with new norms, new mutations,” she observes. Passionate and anguished, she emphasizes the generational madness in holding Kardashian behinds and blistered lips as the pinnacle of beauty. Today, it is possible to change breasts as easily as it is to change dresses. The sixteen-year-old girls who get their mouths plumped often forget that these acts of cosmetic surgery are, for some, irreversible…
A sculpture of proliferating breasts in the form of black charcoal and golden mushrooms suggest a different paradigm, where the womb will no longer serve for fertilization. Occasionally nightmarish and unpleasant, yet pop and grotesque, Daynès’ creations are futuristic anticipations of the Anthropocene, where the artist is unafraid to introduce a certain derision towards these new identities. Where do we come from, what are we, and where are we going?
– Julie Chaizemartin, Journalist and Art Critic (Translation by Alexandra Gilliams)
Mark Powell was born in 1980 in Leeds, Great Britain, and attended the University of Huddersfield, where he enrolled one day by chance when he met the head of the fine arts department to whom he showed some drawings. The meeting facilitated his enrolment, and Mark Powell began to study drawing and painting.
For this first collaboration with the Loo & Lou, the Atelier hosts a gallery of faces superimposed on fragments of maps and plans. Foreground and background merge their reliefs, wrinkles become roads, geological lines become wrinkles at the corner of the eyes. The artist draws his own topography, he whose eventful life and numerous peregrinations have led him from city to city, undoubtedly leafing through the maps and plans that he now covers with a refined line. His drawings are rooted in his own uprooting, in these paths taken or imagined whose sometimes evocative titles lead us to the crossroads. The terrestrial data become supports of their transformation into anatomical data, and conversely. The journey takes place in these comings and goings that inspire us with faces and landscapes.
The perseverance of the artist and the meticulousness of the line explode in the immediacy of the figuration which faces us with force, rendered simply by his instrument of preference, the ballpoint pen. It is a conscientious work that allows few failures but that requires clarity and delicacy. If Mark Powell feels close to Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hockney or Samuel Basset, the finesse of his line reminds us of the careful and learned gesture of engraving. Claude Mellan in the 17th century detached the face of Christ, floating on the sheet of paper, representing it with a single stroke like a long path that takes up the woven thread of the shroud of Saint Veronica. Powell has fun with the same feat, drawing the weaving of the face.
If the first function of a map is to find one’s way, it is also the flattened face of a city, of a place: it is the schematic, essential and conventional representation behind which one can guess, if one wishes, the bubbling of life and the city agitation. It is no coincidence that Mark Powell also chooses old postcards as background archives that capture personal experiences, fragments of stories. We imagine the lives of these faces, all their possible directions; it is an invitation to travel, a work of an aesthetic as well as narrative quality.
Placing the practice of drawing and the nude motif at the very core of his artwork, Arghaël reconnects with a long tradition of bodily representation, ranging from prehistory with the Venus of Willendorf, to the ideal of ancient perfection with Praxiteles’ statuary, to the cult of flesh, whether magnified by Renoir or unsparing asin Lucian Freud’s paintings.
As if the artist was seeking to anchor his work in a soil rich enough to bear the cadences and dances his art conjures up. Doesn’t each of his drawn figures seem to be caught up in some kind of vertigo, all the more intense as each defies our usual perception of human attributes and identity ? Aren’t their faces systematically scratched in a manner similar toArtaud’s self-portraits ?
Immersing his live models in mysterious, indecipherableanimal or human postures, the artist invites us to enter an ambiguous world merging man and beast, which Bacon had explored in his paintings. A world of exploding vital forces within the very hollows of our flesh. In perhaps an even cruder way, Arghaël plays with our representation of sexual organs, at times eluded, at other times, added, freeing himself –and us- from the confines of gender to question the notion of sexual identities. Through the prism of current gender studies and debates on intersexuality, his recent work with transgender models revisits the classic figure of the hermaphrodite. With its lines in perpetual motion, never fully stabilized, and its profusion of forms constantly morphing into new ones, isn’t drawing the ultimate art form to open up the body to its multiple identities ?
From that perspective, Arghaël’s artistic protocol is pure kairos captured in the drawing act itself which, through its obsessive iteration, gives his art a rare power. Far from being mere sketches for future paintings or sculptures, the artist’s drawings stand their ground, free from so-called superior art forms and claiming a territory of their own.
Far from configuring the silhouettes of his nudes, Arghaël’s raw linen canvas brings to life the invisible forces driving his models from within – under their skin.
As a graphic acupuncturist would, his hand maps out a new anatomy of who we are, using strokes of charcoal or pastels to define meridians and reveal the latent energies hidden in the many folds of human skin.
In Arghaël’s new pieces, charcoal gives way to increasingly elliptical forms, where lines are suggested yet enhanced by the fluorescence of pastels and touches of ochre chalk. The bodies spread and stretch like in André Kertész’s photographs, or contort themselves in poses evoking Hans Bellmer’s dismembered dolls. The hand that draws becomes one with the hand that sculpts, escaping the limits of reality to finally embrace its own, ever-lasting energy.
With his Fragments series, Tanc operates a new variation within his own work. This time, the artist inventor of abstract writings reveals surprising diffracted calligraphies.
He changes his practice, and passes from a continuous flow to a discontinuous flow. Thus the uninterrupted gesture which consisted in covering a surface becomes the occasion of a fragmentation of the surface itself. To the beautiful totality of a canvas composed like a page, from left to right, from top to bottom, the artist prefers the way of the fragment. Diffracting the One, he carries out a new internal cutting of the painting. Change its syntax by changing its rhythm.
The passage from continuous to discontinuous, from unity to multiplicity, offers new possibilities to the artist. Energy is no longer the same. It is no longer the result of a single flow, but on the contrary of a multitude of flows.
Tanc proceeds by dispersion, fragmentation of writings. Moreover, he begins to work on disparate fragments of paper that he assembles, juxtaposes in larger compositions. The whole forms a puzzle of writings with a deconstructed style.
Each piece of the puzzle has its variations. Variations in scale and style. The magnification, or close-up, allows discoveries. It reveals the digging of a surface or an unpublished grain from which new motifs emerge in the pictorial matter. This one appears fluid, scattered, letting emerge the emptiness between the lines. The drips give a sense of gravity to the painting. Wonderful veins of reality.
Lines, drips, stains form segmented writings, intertwined in networks. From their optical synthesis, figurative images sometimes emerge: a blue tree blown down by the wind, branches bending under the weight of snow, unspeakable things reflected in the water, or, again, water trickling over the signs of an unknown writing. It is a matter of flow and blue. The use of two types of spray cans, one based on solvents, the other based on water, contributes to create accidents of textures favourable to the reverie of the eye.
Tanc’s work is situated at the intersection of several artistic worlds, oriental calligraphy, American action painting, from Franz Kline to Jackson Pollock, New York graffiti, Korean painting with the Dansaekhwa movement, and a constellation of artists that goes from Cy Twombly to Henri Michaux.
The Fragments series rethinks the relationship between the different styles previously developed by the artist, as it functions as a new mise en abyme of the work within the work. For, as Tanc himself says, his goal is to “rewrite his language constantly.
By Eric Monsinjon Historian and art critic December 2022
“I work with the medium of collage, using recycled and found materials.
I enjoy cruising through second-hand shops’ shelves and street libraries, searching for books and magazines, ephemera or other types of paper to use in my collages.
The composition process always starts with a figurative subject or a small group of images which I feel are related to each other.
From a figurative foundation I then continue by adding paper layers, juxtaposing textures, tones and fragments to create a whole that feels complex yet simplified to its essence and that acquires a stronger abstract and lyric nature as the work progresses.
The subjects I seek, often presenting a narrative quality, are evocative of a story that feels at the same time intimate and universal.
Related to historical and social themes that blend the boundaries between past and present, permanent and temporary, personal and political, they are a statement to the continuity of human existence.
My work acts as a mirror that allows me to look into my identity and feelings while also bringing new purpose to images that would otherwise go unnoticed.
I aim to highlight the connections that exist between my own experience and others’ and I always felt that collage was the perfect medium to establish this dialogue.”
“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
Exhibitions
2024 Small is beautiful, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano (Italy)
ARGHAËL // LYDIE ARICKX // FLO ARNOLD // DOMINIQUE LACLOCHE // CEDRIC LE CORF // CHRISTOPHE MIRALLES // JOËL PERSON // PAUL DE PIGNOL // OLIVIER DE SAGAZAN // JOHAN VAN MULLEM // JEAN CLAUDE WOUTERS
“We live” is the title of the first manuscript published by Lydie Arickx in 2014, such could be the subtitle of this first group exhibition, so much the vital breath seems to spread through the works, certainly diverse but all sharing the idea of a communion with nature, Whether it is through the search for the unexpected and regenerating springs of natural materials, used as mediums, through the transgressive and revealing act of dissection – which can be likened to a pictorial introspection – or by resorting to the diluted traces of ink and pastel leading the figuration to the limits of its metamorphoses.
The meeting of the eleven artists presented allows the viewer to embrace in a single vision the singular and quivering artistic identity of the gallery, made of moving materials and intimate roars. Aesthetics of engagement rather than contemplation in front of Lydie Arickx’s germinations and Olivier de Sagazan’s tortured masses, ferocious auscultation in the heart of Cedric le Corf’s ashen undergrowth and flayed sculptures, ghostly dance to the rhythm of Christophe Miralles’ anonymous bodies, outcrop of an interior cartography in the spontaneous and green features of Joël Person, proliferations and vegetable delicacies at Florence Arnold and Dominique Lacloche, telluric and fantastic visions at Paul de Pignol and Johan Van Mullem, veinous and troubled expressiveness at Arghaël, strange occultation of desired landscapes at the only photographer of the group, Jean-Claude Wouters.
These artists explore the earth and the flesh more than they create dreamed spaces. Their motifs are those of our world, for better or for worse, without concession, with the tenderness of love and the tension of death. Borrowing not from a return to primitivism but from the source of a sublime classicism, made of landscapes and human figures, that is to say “nature and natures”, in echo and fusion, where the great history of painting and sculpture, from the anatomies of Gautier d’Agoty to the impressionist whispers, passing through the Spanish Golden Age, silently deafens. But here revisited in the light of a contemporaneity concerned with biological understanding and the preservation of nature. The latter is indeed everywhere. We want to save it, give it legal rights, exploit it with respect. To take it once again as the standard theme of an exhibition might therefore seem easy, except that here, in this exhibition, in this gallery, it is not just a fashionable straitjacket, it is the living flesh of the works. Nature is no longer the fixed model, it is the work, it is the living landscape, it is the bilious torment of its author, it is the mirror of man and his innumerable complexities. “The plant is a silent collaborator that I try to hear. I do not impose my vision on these leaves but compose it with them” confides Dominique Lacloche.
For the artists of the gallery all maintain an intimate link with the body – human or plant – and its secret grooves like so many valleys in which the gaze does not dare to penetrate at first sight. Abysses of suffering or eroticism, crucible of organic mutations and upheavals of life. Artists on the verge of their skin whose fragility and poetry become manifestos of resilience or cries for survival. Against the immobility of the image, we are in the existentialism of the form, probably requiring sometimes a certain fetishism or a kind of animist mysticism. However, the power of the imaginary always passes here by a matierist gesture, prosaic or more sophisticated, but whose characteristic is to leave the free field to the experimentation and the intuition. Whether they mimic states of enjoyment or morbidity, whether they ooze hedonism or melancholy, the human and plant figures presented in this exhibition are fragments of emotion, responding to the vast prism painted and drawn running from the formal to the informal, virtuoso and intranquil elasticities that, even when they correspond to the definition of still life, are above all presences. One enters freely into the realm of the senses.
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.
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
Solo shows
2023 « The Art of living », Hugo Galley, New-York (Etats-Unis)
Maison de la Région Occitanie, New-York (Etats-Unis)
« Symbiose », Galerie Ida Médicis, Paris (France)
2022 Galerie Ariel Jakob, Paris (France)
« Résonance », Galerie Ida Médicis, Paris (France)
Culture Inside Gallery, Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
2021 Galerie Le Confort des Etranges, Toulouse (France)
« Résonances », Eglise Saint Jean Baptiste, Castelnau-le-Lez (France)
Nezhakanouni gallery, Marbella (Espagne)
« The Forest call », Galerie Ida Médicis, Paris (France)
2020 « Voyage à Giverny », Pierre-Luc Poujol, Musée Paul Valéry Sète (France)
Collections publiques et privées
Musée Paul Valéry, Sète (France)
Région Occitanie – Pyrénées / Méditerranée, Montpellier (France)
Ville de Divonne les bains (France)
Ville de Castelnau-le-lez (France)
Siège BNP Paribas Cardiff, Paris (France)
Siège FDI Groupe, Montpellier (France)
Art Bastion, Design District, Miami (Etats-Unis)
Evêché de Montpellier (France)
Group shows
2018 « Dripping energy », Pulse, Miami (Etats-Unis)
2017 « Sur un arbre perché », Domaine de Restinclières (France)
Galerie Maxanart, La bastide Clairence (France)
2016 Art Bastion Gallery, Miami (France)
St’Art, Strasbourg (France)
2015 Ricart Gallery, Miami (France)
“Scope”, Bâle (Suisse)
“Scope”, Miami (Etats-Unis)
2014 Ricart Gallery, Miami (France)
2011 BMAC Gallery, Brooklyn (Etats-Unis)
Ward Nasse Gallery, New-York (Etats-Unis)
Galerie Hors Champs, Paris (France)
2010 Galerie de Médicis, Paris (France)
AWARDS AND DISTINCTIONS
2002 Winner of the international competition to design the official Châteauneuf-du-Pape bottle
2000 Winner of the international competition for the creation of the “Bethlehem 2000” visual identity, under the patronage of UNESCO and the French government.
N°631 Series Carbone, 2023, Mixed technic, wood charcoal on paper, 150 x 200 cm
N°652 Series Arborescences, 2023, Mxed technic, acrylique on canvas, plant ash, 150 x 150 cm
N°653 Series Arborescences, 2023, mixed technic, acrylic on canvas, plant ash, 150 x 150 cm
N°636 Series Empreintes, 2023, mixed technic, acrylic on canvas, plant ash, 200 x 150 cm
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
The greater purpose 8, 2022, Acrylic and lacquer on vintage documents, 90 X 70 cm
There is a shaking in society 12, 2021, Acrylic and lacquer on newspaper, 160 x 129 cm
The greater purpose 2, 2022, Acrylic and lacquer on vintage documents, 90 X 70 cm
There is a shaking in society 16, 2021, Acrylic and lacquer on newspaper, 160 x 130 cm
Encounters 10, 2021, Acrylic and lacquer on newspaper, 140 x 134 cm
There is a shaking in society 11, 2021, Acrylic and lacquer on newspaper, 158 x 114 cm
There is a shaking in society 10, 2021, Acrylic and lacquer on newspaper, 156 x 123 cm
The greater purpose 7, 2022, Acrylic and lacquer on vintage documents, 90 X 70 cm
The greater purpose 5, 2022, Acrylic and lacquer on vintage documents, 90 X 70 cm
“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.
Cheval Dragon 4, 2013, Black stone pencil on paper, 62 x 34 cm
Cheval Dragon 6, 2013, Black stone pencil on paper, 62 x 34 cm
Detail, Déferlante, 2021, 985 x 152cm
Detail, Déferlante, 2021, 985 x 152cm
Exhibition view, Déferlante, 2021, 985 x 152cm
Cheval Dragon 3, 2013, Black stone on paper, 62 x 34 cm
Cheval Dragon 1, 2013, Black stone pencil on paper, 62 x 34 cm
Exibition View, Série Cheval Dragon, 2013, Black stone pencil on paper, 62 x 34 cm
Autoportrait, Série Les Verticales, Black stone pencil on paper, 2020, 60 x 35 cm
No. 2, Série Bruits du Monde, Black stone pencil on paper, 2017, 29,5 x 29,5 cm
Exibition View, La déferlante ans Coastline, Black stone pencil on paper
La Déferlante Intérieure, Charcoal on paper, 2020-21, 244 x 95 cm
Exhibition view, Série Ligne de Vie, Pencil on paper, 1982, 31,5 x 25,5 cm
No. 3, Série Bruits du Monde, Black stone pencil on paper, 2017, 29,5 x 29,5 cm
L’étudiant aux Beaux-Arts, Charcoal on paper, 1985, 108 x 75 cm
No. 5, Série Bruits du Monde,Black stone pencil on paper, 2017, 29,5 x 29,5 cm
Exhibition view, Déferlante Intérieure and Robes Cabrées
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.
Embrasure 8, acrylic on canvas, 114×162 cm, 2021, Tana Borissova
Embrasure 1, acrylic on canvas, 38×46 cm, 2020, Tana Borissova
Aile 7, acrylic on canvas, 50×61 cm, 2020, Tana Borissova
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.”
Untitled 10 (Detail), 2021, Grass, flowers, clay, mixed media, 140 x 40 x 60 cm | Image: Alexandra Gilliams
Untitled 10 (Detail), 2021, Grass, flowers, clay, mixed media, 140 x 40 x 60 cm | Image: Alexandra Gilliams
Untitled 17 (Detail), 2021, Grass, clay, mixed media, 132 x 28 x 18 cm | Image: Alexandra Gilliams
Untitled 13, 2021, Grass, clay, mixed media, 71 x 24 x 40 cm | Image: Alexandra Gilliams
Exhibition View | Image: Alexandra Gilliams
Exhibition View | Image: Alexandra Gilliams
Untitled 9, 2022, Acrylic, grass, clay and mixed materials, 130x160cm
Untitled 9, 2022, Acrylic, grass, clay and mixed materials, 130x160cm
Untitled 3, 2022, Acrylic, grass, clay and mixed materials, 160x130cm
Untitled 3, 2022, Acrylic, grass, clay and mixed materials, 160x130cm
Untitled 5, 2022, Acrylic, grass, clay and mixed materials, 160x130cm
Untitled 5, 2022, Acrylic, grass, clay and mixed materials, 160x130cm
Untitled 6, 2022, Acrylic, grass, clay and mixed media on canvas, 160x130cm
Untitled 30, 2021, Grass, clay, mixed media, 35 x 10 x 19 cm | Image: Alexandra Gilliams
There is the body that is modeled, kneaded, triturated, excavated, dissected. It is transformed to the extreme with a certain fascination bestowed upon it. Between the palms of Olivier de Sagazan, matter takes life and is incarnated in unconscious doubles. Clay creatures are birthed and earth emerges through the images of the mythological beings, extirpating themselves with grand effort from the chtonian depths. Moving with clumsiness and dignity, they are an uneasy reflection of our deep, primitive nature; a throbbing, heart-rending echo that we have spent millennia repressing. Born of the earth, yet still partly stuck in it, they remind us that our bodies are made of the same vital matrix. This is “world flesh,” an idea conceptualized by Merleau-Ponty who envisaged the universe as a whole through a sensitive and fundamental correlation of the elements. De Sagazan never ceases to explore this primordial ontology in an ever more intense, ever more intimate desire to pierce the secrets of life.
Now, the artist attacks the landscape felt as a body, yet he has removed the human figure. “For me, a painting or a sculpture is always an organism. It is a question of bringing life to it,” he expresses. Facing the canvas, the artist creates more than he paints. His hands knead the clay and, this time, he has mixed it with grass, glue, and acrylic. Composite material that will never solidify, but could be sown. His body moves in front of crusty materials whose germinations stretch out in dazzling undergrowth. With large gestures from top to bottom, without any prior idea, he enhances it with bright colors, making the plants grow towards the light in a spontaneous, irrepressible impulse of elevation and depth. The texture becomes denser, materialist, welcoming reliefs and transcending any idea of representation. The painting here is not an image: it is breathing and has become “flesh.” Their naturalistic textures enhanced with expressionist colors inevitably brings to mind Anselm Kiefer’s dramatic fields of straw, mud, coal, and lead. Bright yellow, dreamy blue, acid green, a mysterious red… With De Sagazan, however, the landscape is anything but symbolic, it is the energy of nature whose magical body extends our own. The artist also sees self portraits in them, like a transfiguration of his conscious being within earth. He claims deep commitment in imagining a new alliance between man and nature: a nature that he has wrongly forgotten, to the point of disincarnating from it. Painting and sculpture would perhaps be the only gestures capable of making us feel this physical, biological link that unites our flesh to the world in an unfathomable sensitivity.
Encounters 10, 2021, Acrylic and enamel on vintage newspaper, 140 x 134 cm
There is a shaking in society 11 2021, Acrylic on contemporary newspaper, 158 x 114 cm
There is a shaking in society 10, 2021, Acrylic on contemporary newspaper, 156 x 123 cm
There is a shaking in society 16, 2021, Acrylic on vintage and contemporary newspaper, 160 x 130 cm
There is a shaking in society, 2021, Acrylic on vintage and contemporary newspaper, 114 x 160 cm
Loo & Lou Gallery is pleased to present recent works by the South African artist Andrew Ntshabele for his very first exhibition in France from April 1 to May 21, 2022.
Ntshabele has quickly developed a personal technique through painting figures in acrylic on large format supports made of collaged newspapers.
Andrew Ntshabele paints 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, he feels that people should confront his art from a new perspective and try to find happiness in these difficult times. Within some of his more recent work, more joyful feelings are present. For this new series, he explored the work on a medium and large scale, using newspapers related to articles on Covid-19.
“When approaching Tana Borissova’s paintings, a moment of epiphany may arise while gazing into their forms. Many of the works proposed in this exhibition escape the immediate classifications that we usually lend to this technique. The viewer may have difficulty grasping what exactly they are looking at, with no obvious sign emerging that can satisfy certain interpretations and reassuring identifications. The absence of any iconography and the spontaneity of the organic forms testify to a proximity manifesting itself as lyrical abstraction. Shall we not acknowledge a certain effort to resist different types of visual and conceptual anecdotes that have dominated the history of painting?
Borissova shares the painter Nicolas de Staël’s “undecided” position by refusing to choose between abstraction and figuration. If her blue paintings evoke waterfalls, she refuses any reference to the idea of a landscape. Nature as it is shown here has nothing to do with a fleeting impression of a pastoral scene. It refers more to the ancient conception of phusis, designating a continuous birth of forms; a momentum that is miraculously captured in the thickness of her paint strokes.
Borissova skilfully plays with the contrasts between the intensity of black backgrounds and a chromatic efflorescence that invades the canvas. She also produces a duality of transparency and opacity, tempering the impact of her rough impasto with the liquescence of the acrylic paint. By giving the motifs the appearance of crackling matter, the artist opens her painting to the elements of poetic fire and imaginary water.
Her figures are forever in suspense, caught in between a stark presence and the heaviness of absence, like a passage, emergence, breakthrough, or burst. The canvas becomes a sequence of twisted, fragmented, and undulating forms, carrying its motives in aquatic and carnal becomings, as in the aerial and lyrical blazes of the Embrasure series.
Emerging from the obscure depths of memory, Borissova offers us a moment that has been torn from oblivion and the alienation of the world.”
For Johan Van Mullem’s second exhibition Ataraxie at Loo & Lou Gallery, introspection remains at the heart of his work, however his famous, abstract depictions of faces transform into a perspective of the outside world through landscapes. The select anthropomorphic portraits in this exhibition act as a catalyst for this transition, where human appears to amalgamate with nature. These ethereal portraits and settings have come forward from the depths of a silent and unconscious world within Van Mullem, “where emotional information is stored.” Distinctive scenic elements are composed through an expulsion of rapid movements that he anchors with a horizon line. According to the artist, landscapes offer a clarity of perception in an increasingly uncertain world. Painting allows him to release and attempt to understand the impressions that this world has forcibly imprinted on his subconscience since the beginning of his existence. His work additionally references his Flemish origins, and believes these impressions can be passed down through generations and from one kindred spirit to another. He has referenced Rembrandt and Da Vinci as “companions” throughout his journey as an artist.
Within this new series, Van Mullem develops his unique style of stream of consciousness painting that rests between figurative and abstraction that he has been working on since he was only five years old. He began creating art as a means of escape from his difficult, itinerant childhood as the son of a diplomat. He was born in the Congo but spent his formative years in Tunisia, a place that he described, after returning to visit as an adult, had such wonderful light that eventually introduced new colors and luminosity to his landscape paintings. Van Mullem works with oil-based etching inks, reminiscent of his time spent as an engraver, and builds them upon each other to depict storms, rain, and sunsets over mountains. The colors overlap, fade, and stretch, yet they rest together in harmony. Creating depth that he then glides over and erases, the light is unveiled and the subject comes to life; The sun comes out, a burst of rain splashes onto a body of water, the wind blows. The artist has created an imaginary world with unconventional colors that are a reflection of his soul and memories, rising from his conscious and subconscious. Landscapes have historically been a means of escape and of spiritual gain. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Romantics created landscapes that evoked contemplation and existentialism, displaying the world as much larger than we are. The longer one looks at Van Mullem’s paintings, the more the unique topography becomes discernable and facilitates reflection, as if one is peering out through a fogged window, their own reflection in the glass cast over a vast landscape.
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
Greater they say, 2022, Ballpoint pen drawing on a antique map of greater New York, 39 x 51 cm
The greatest city, 2022, Ballpoint pen drawing on a antique 1939 map, 74 x 67 cm
Never sleep and keep dancing, 2022, Ballpoint pen drawing on a antique map of New York, 42,5 x 81,5 cm
Along the Seine, 2022, Ballpoint pen drawing on a 1890s map of Paris, 89,5 x 64 cm
Heartstrings are ear drums, 2022, Ballpoint pen drawing on a collection of antique postcards, 55 x 61,5 cm
From hut to house through calluses, 2023, Ballpoint pen drawing on a antique map of the British Isles, 38,5 x 50 cm
From January 21 to February 18, 2022, the exhibition ESPACES MUTANTS in the Atelier at Loo & Lou Gallery will present the work of the artists of the 2021-2022 promotion from the French Academy in Madrid, at the Casa de Velázquez. The exhibition reflects the collective spirit that unites these artists during their residency in Madrid, as well as the diversity of practices that coexist this year in the studios at the Casa de Velázquez: painting, engraving, sculpture, visual arts, photography, video, and film. The result of a close collaboration between the Casa de Velázquez and Loo & Lou Gallery, ESPACES MUTANTS also emphasizes the synergies that unite these two places, both as incubators of innovative practices and unwavering supporters of contemporary creation.
ESPACES MUTANTS is at once an immersive experience, an experimentation in curating and a moment of encounter with the public for the 13 participating artists: Najah ALBUKAI, Carmen AYALA MARÍN, Chloé BELLOC, Maxime BIOU, Lise GAUDAIRE, Mathilde LESTIBOUDOIS, Anna LÓPEZ LUNA, Eve MALHERBE, Alberto MARTÍN MENACHO, Adrien MENU, Pablo PÉREZ PALACIO, Arnaud ROCHARD, Mery SALES.
“Like the stars that can only be seen if you don’t look directly at them, the artistic gestures here escape perception. They flee, struggle, twist, and unravel under our fingers even as the work comes to life. How, then, could one restore it? How could one give an account of this ephemeral breath, to pay homage to it and to give it sight? How, above all, would one be able to capture the fragility of its emergence—to freeze it, without breaking it?
With this mutant space, the artists in residence at Casa de Velázquez offer us an infiltration into the heart of this abstract idea. An exhibition which is like a challenge between constellation and flow of thought, that plunges us into the suspension of time within creation and its metamorphoses. Sketches, research documents, finished pieces, or works in progress, the pieces here take place in the collective installation where singularities intermingle with what is shared. By exhibiting together for the first time, the artists draw a portrait of their experience working as residents while they deliver their first forceful lines.
ESPACES MUTANTS is thus hybrid and plural in nature. The materials, forms and textures intermingle; the directions that lead to interpretation are multiplied; the perspectives are drawn and transformed as connections are established and installed. At the heart of this laboratory, conceived as an immersive experience, a lot depends on the spectator who can activate each of these fragments, read between their lines and to allow themselves to be touched by the crackling breath of these creations in residence.”
About CASA DE VELÁZQUEZ
Casa de Velázquez is an institution under the authority of the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, and is part of the network of five French schools abroad (EFE). It is unique in that it supports both contemporary creation and research in the humanities and social sciences. Casa de Velázquez also plays a major role in disseminating and promoting the work carried out in residence through a rich and varied program, supported by a vast network of international partners.
The ACADÉMIE DE FRANCE IN MADRID is a privileged space that welcomes every year in residence some thirty artists of diverse geographical and cultural origins. Every year, thirteen artists are selected to develop their creative projects in residence.
For the complete list of available works, please contact us by e-mail or by telephone at (+33) 01 42 74 03 97.
Loo & Lou Gallery Haut Marais 16.11.2021 – 22.01.2022
L’évolution (Oscar), 2020, Bones and resin, 200 x 300 cm
View of the exhibition “Lianescences” by Lydie Arickx | Image: Emilie Mathé Nicolas
View of the exhibition “Lianescences” by Lydie Arickx | Image: Emilie Mathé Nicolas
Chemin de Croix VII, 2020, Bones, 43 x 31 x 20 cm
Chemin de Croix VIII, 2020, Magnetic ferrite, 39 x 39 x 18 cm
Chemin de Croix III, 2020, Resin and bones, 30 x 17,5 x 11 cm
Returning from Chambord…
After the spectacular and monumental exhibition Arborescences held at the Château de Chambord, Loo & Lou Gallery welcomes for the third time the artist Lydie Arickx: painter, sculptor, performer and major figure of the French expressionist scene whose work tirelessly celebrates the cycle of life. Supported by the Loo & Lou Foundation, Arborescences is probably one of the artist’s most accomplished exhibitions.
Lianescences is a kind of extension of Arborescences for an audience that would like to live or relive part of the experience of an outsized and protean proposal.
Lianescences is, of course, not intended to be a repetition of Chambord, but will highlight a works selected especially for Loo & Lou Gallery, and focuses on some the most important and remarkable pieces. Crucifixes symbolizing the 14 stations of the Way of the Cross, presented in the Chapel of Chambord, or The Evolution (Oscar), a bas-relief of bone and resin scaling at 200 x 300 cm will be presented, but an accent will be placed on a presentation of works by the artist, of a more modest format, belonging to the cabinet of curiosities.
“The qualifier ‘expressionist’ that is often attached to the work of Lydie Arickx could be considered reductive. Her work certainly distorts the figure, twists material and gives an account of the violence of the world, but her consistent research of new materials and new forms nourishes her work beyond any label. Her pieces represent more precisely the fears, engulfments, rough, joyful moments and miracles we humans experience with a softness that is moving. After her projects at the Cordeliers convent, the La Piscine museum, the Conciergerie or Biron, she proposed a powerful exhibition at the Château de Chambord for four months. It evoked a reflection on life and its forms and highlighted the porosity between mineral, vegetal and animal, living beings inhabited by a breath with whom death cannot compete, but simply entertain. Whether she uses canvas, concrete, earth, metal, fabric, 3D prints, concrete or ash, Arickx transmits an unparalleled energy that makes her one of the most inventive and engaging artists of her generation.” – Text from the exhibition Arborescences, Château de Chambord, 2021
Nativité (detail), 2019, Found canvases and tapestries assembled and sewn, 378 x 217 cm | Image: Emilie Mathé Nicolas
Nativité, 2019, Found canvases and tapestries assembled and sewn, 378 x 217 cm | Image: Emilie Mathé Nicolas
Nativité (detail), 2019, Found canvases and tapestries assembled and sewn, 378 x 217 cm | Image: Emilie Mathé Nicolas
Nativité (detail), 2019, Found canvases and tapestries assembled and sewn, 378 x 217 cm | Image: Emilie Mathé Nicolas
Nativité (detail), 2019, Found canvases and tapestries assembled and sewn, 378 x 217 cm | Image: Emilie Mathé Nicolas
Nativité (detail), 2019, Found canvases and tapestries assembled and sewn, 378 x 217 cm | Image: Emilie Mathé Nicolas
“The Nativité tapestry is made from hundreds of scraps of different canvases and tapestries that were collected here and there. Assembled together like a collage and sewn into a kind of patchwork, these different pieces form a large fresco that can be described as ‘pop’ due to its references to popular imagery and art history. Animals and characters evolve in varied landscapes where each scene follows one another in different depths of field: Millet and Chardin rub shoulders with Snow White, Renoir and Gauguin meet the Aristocats, and the Virgin presents a strange child to a fireman in the center a flurry of different situations. Nativité is one great, orchestrated bubble that could also be described as a collaboration since hundreds of other hands contributed to it, and it also pays tribute to these unknown female artisans. Together, these women and their work help form this ‘global’ art piece.”
– Aurélia Jaubert
This is Aurélia Jaubert’s first collaboration with Loo & Lou Gallery. In 2020, Nativité received a special mention from the jury at the Contextile Biennial in Guimares, Portugal.
“From her first paintings of colored mortars that she collaged with her original photographs to her more recent tapestries, Aurélia Jaubert has been fascinated by the metamorphoses that can occur in imagery through their passage from one medium to another and the illusions they can engender. She has progressively left the traditional surface of painting for heterogeneous compositions, concocting a kind of utopian mixture that reflects a sort of historical crisis of representation. Through borrowing and combining different approaches (painting, textiles, photography, digital images, collage, sewing, sculpture, sound, music and light), Jaubert sheds a light on what is leftover. Her gestures of an artist and collector of objects are made apparent through her interest in subtle manifestations of nature (reflections, bubbles, shadows, traces…) that she inserts into a cycle that reinstates them with an unexpected aesthetic value, all the while managing to remain faithful to the original image. Dreaming about the fantastic destiny of small accidents or objects of everyday life (burrs, stains, drips, colored debris, decommissioned magnetic tapes, old swimming pool buoys, fabric samples…), Jaubert, an ‘herbalist of the asphalt’, weaves together modern ruins in order to reveal elegant, surprising, bizarre and unprecedented imagery.”
– Dominique Païni, independent critic and curator
Director of the Centre Pompidou (2000-2005)
Director of the Cinémathèque française (1990-2000)
Monbay Victoria Terminus, 2004, Oil and collage on canvas, 200 x 200 cm
View of the exhibition “Les Années Indiennes 2000 – 2010”
View of the exhibition “Les Années Indiennes 2000 – 2010” – “Butterfly”, “Dog” et “Yogi”
View of the exhibition “Les Années Indiennes 2000 – 2010” – “Indigo” and “Turmeric”
La Fuite II, 2005, Mixed media on canvas, 133 x 210 cm
La fuite I, 2005, Oil and collage on canvas, 130 x 197 cm
La Fuite II, Details, 2005, Mixed media on canvas, 133 x 210 cm
View of the exhibition “Les Années Indiennes 2000-2010” – “Relief”
Relief I, 2005, Mixed media and collage, 231 x 170 cm
View of the exhibition “Les Années Indiennes 2000 – 2010” – “Tsunami”
View of the exhibition “Les Années Indiennes 2000 – 2010” – “Tsunami”
View of the exhibition “Les Années Indiennes 2000 – 2010” – “Tsunami”
Paraphrasing the exergue of Nietzsche’s book Human, All Too Human, one could say that Fred Kleinberg’s work was made for free spirits, as the artist considers himself first and foremost a traveler… This is how he finds inspiration and the material for his pieces, and in this search he has also witnessed great contemporary tragedies. What Kleinberg seeks in this nomadic exploration is not only humanity and the exploration of other cultures, but also what philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls a “chaos-germ”, from which a style can emerge…”
Some thirty works produced between 2000 and 2010 in India
From this point of view, Fred Kleinberg’s Indian Years is not the travel diary of an artist in search of exoticism. Of the thirty or so works produced between 2000 and 2010 in India, we will not find the usual batch of images dear to tourist attractions, with its collection of sacred cows and the colourful abundance of women’s saris. In 2004, while doing an artist’s residency near Pondicherry, the painter had no idea that he was going to find himself at the heart of one of the most tragic natural disasters in history, in the face of which the torments of the shipwrecked Medusa or those of Jonah in the grip of divine wrath might seem like mere anecdotes. On December 26, an earthquake of rare violence provoked a tsunami that hit southern India. Among the rubble of his studio, which was completely destroyed, the artist found only a roll of paper returned by the sea, still bearing the scars of the tsunami’s violence; this became the support for the testimony that the painter had given to this tragedy.
A fresco over 18 meters long as a testimony to this extraordinary tragedy
Fred Kleinberg responded to the anger of nature with the rage of expression by creating a fresco in situ, using black chalk, in a format that was equal to this extraordinary tragedy: over 18 metres long! As the artist learned about the victims he knew, he drew a picture, like a dazibao, which gradually unfolds. This all-over fresco becomes the real seismograph of the catastrophe the painter witnesses. Like an immense graphic wave carrying all the spectres of those who have been swept away, this monumental work constitutes a sublime replica, drawing the viewer into the feeling of dread and aesthetic delight dear to the Romantics. The flow of the sea meets the flow of the continuous drawing, the only way to render the tangled impressions and images carried by the power of the tsunami. By using exclusively black and white, the artist gives his work a dramatic tension that evokes the darkest pieces of Goya as much as Picasso’s Guernica.
Fred Kleinberg’s practice of painting is ‘dialogic,’ with an emphasis on listening, and a desire to connect with the communities in which he creates.
Most of the other works in the exhibition demonstrate the commitment of Kleinberg’s art to a human adventure in which the artist engages in a “dialogical” practice of painting, emphasizing listening, and the desire to create links with the communities in which he creates. Like the painting Relief, in which the formal questions and the choice of materials remain inseparable from the human experience that gave birth to them; the jute canvases with silk-screened motifs that frame the painting are cereal bag wrappers, recovered by the artist when he was distributing food with NGOs. By integrating pieces of recovered posters into paintings such as Monbay Victoria terminus or La fuite, the painter also returns to a use of collage derived from Cubism, and suggests the impression of a world shattered in a string of coloured images. The use of the gum arabic technique for some of the works made in the wake of the tsunami, finally allows the artist to accentuate the spectral character of the painted figures. For it is the moods of flight, fear and survival that constitute the omnipresent affects of a majority of the pieces in the exhibition, uniting animal fear with human anguish in the same drama. Only the beautiful pastels of Sadhou figures or young girls, whose survivors from a world whose history seems to be a succession of atrocities, balance the impression of apocalypse that dominates this painting, a distant and noble descendant, no doubt, of a renewed romantic energy.
During his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, from which he graduated in 1986 with honours, Joël Person was able to perfect his drawing skills by observing live models. This concern to constantly deepen his eye and his technique remains intact today. No matter the themes of predilection that he tackles: horses, hair, bodies, portraits or scenes of everyday life, he applies the same rigor to his work and gives way to the sole requirement of an extremely precise rendering that is likely to bring out the very presence of the subject he is drawing.
Even at a very young age, drawing was the only way for Person to express himself, given his dyslexia, which made him unsuitable for an educational system that was essentially focused on learning abstract language forms. Drawing was his resilience, and his way of reappropriating a world that had escaped him.
By practicing live drawing since his childhood, Person has reached a perfection in his art that should, in no way, be confused with academism and the traps of a demonstrative virtuosity, having no other end than to impress an audience eager with a trompe-l’oeil. His practice of drawing has nothing to do with superfluous work or presumptuous play, rather his taste for realism responds to the imperious desire to capture the truth of the subject. Whether it is with the immense frescoes of galloping horses or the more modest drawings, Person immediately inscribes his work in the highest pictorial tradition inherited from the Renaissance, and that of the romanticism of Delacroix or Géricault.
Even when he is inspired by visuals taken from social networks – those of CRS, yellow waistcoats or migrants – Person reworks each of these images on the spot. The reworking through drawing then brings a striking “aesthetic added value.” For example, the drawings of the CRS he is doing for Frédéric Pajak’s next magazine reveals a dimension worthy of the SF universe of a RoboCop. In front of the drawings that Person has produced from internet images, we measure the abyss that separates the attention opened by the artist’s gaze, pencil in hand, and this passive perception that feeds our addiction to social networks.
Person dreams of founding a school of drawing, like the “school of the gaze” instituted in Salzburg by Kokoschka after the Second World War. The ethics of his art remain faithful to Matisse’s teaching, which attributes to the artist the role of undoing the veil of clichés that stands between our perception and reality. Like our relationship with animals, these ultimate figures of otherness that the artist admirably deconstructs in all his work, inviting us to rediscover these silent masters.
Since Freud, we know that great works of art often find their impetus from a childhood memory linked to an emotional content mixing desire and prohibition. Person attributes his fascination for the equestrian motif to his childhood encounter with a Chinese statuette of a Tang horse belonging to his mother, which he was strictly forbidden to touch. Through drawing, he quickly managed to take hold of this impulsive universe where woman and animal seemed intimately linked.
In fact, many of the artist’s drawings of horses make this ambivalence of desire and fear perceptible, sometimes leading the artist to superimpose motifs with overtly erotic components on those of the equine figure.
Thus, with regard to his series of charcoal drawings, the Robes Cabrées, we are reminded of Paul Valery’s observation about Degas’ drawings: “The horse walks on its toes. Four nails carry it. No animal holds on to the first dancer, the star of the corps de ballet, like a thoroughbred in perfect equilibrium, which the hand of the one who rides it seems to hold suspended, and which moves forward with a small step in the sun. Degas painted him with a verse; he said of him: Tout nerveusement nu dans sa robe de soie. “
By repeating a series of galloping horses, whose tight framing on the animal’s chest accentuates the feeling of power and vitality, Person offers a masterpiece with Déferlante to the art of drawing. We find all the tension and eroticism of the bodies dear to the Romantics revisited by the rhythmic power of all-over. This work, whose black charcoal texture enhances the feeling of musical vitality experienced when contemplating it, bears witness to a limitless processual character. Indeed, by repeating these serial cavalcade motifs, the artist can multiply the dimension of his creation indefinitely, even to the point of envisaging the crazy dream of covering the Great Wall of China with them!
By decomposing drawing as a medium assigned to a certain function circumscribed to the space of a frame delimiting a sketch or a preparatory exercise, Person opens up a future for it that takes it beyond its traditional limits. Is it not the symbolic dimension of mythical and legendary horses – whether those of Neptune or of the Apocalypse – that run through history to signify the power of transport of which this animal has condensed the dreams? It is the strength of Person’s work to carry us away with the only recourse of drawing towards the mystery of art, and his insatiable desire for elsewhere…
Corolle II, 2020, Wall sculpture, Ceramic, D 60 cm
Cauliflora, 2021, Earthenware, H 125 x D 27 cm
Cauliflora, 2021, Earthenware, H 125 x D 27 cm
Efflorescence II, 2020, Wall sculpture, Glazed earthenware, D 60 cm
Exhibition view, Contemporary ceramic, 2020, George V
Exhibition view, Contemporary ceramic, 2020, George V
“My work is an exploration of the forms of nature. I model the earth and give birth to delicate pieces, which I wrap in a powdery white, on which the light comes to rest to make the lines vibrate. Movement appears as an essential element of my work, through living forms and suspended moving parts. I seek the meeting between strength and fragility by working my sculptures in an ethereal way in their forms, and powerful in their dimensions. A petal, a tree, the wind… It is my emotion that I try to show.”
— Louise Frydman
This presentation echoes the group exhibition “Bing! Bing! 砰 砰 ! Céramique Contemporaine” presented by ICICLE (35e Avenue George V, Paris 8e) from March 1 to September 8, 2021. Open Monday through Saturday, 9:30 am – 5:30 pm.
“In Mandarin, the character 砰 (pēng) is the equivalent of the French onomatopoeia “bing!”: it evokes a shock, a clash, and means a rupture, a sudden event that modifies reality.”
The artist Joël Person in Rosa Bonheur’s open air studio for a drawing performance
Published on June 07, 2022
With Rosa Bonheur and Joël Person everything is a story of horses galloping on monumental formats. First those of Rosa: her “Horse Market”, a tour de force of the painter to demonstrate to the world that “genius has no sex”; then those of Joel: his “Breaking” of horses which exert on the spectator and the painter a fascination for these graceful and powerful beings. Half a century separates them, but undeniably, Joel is a child of Rosa.
So for the bicentenary of Rosa’s birth, Joel pays tribute to Rosa by continuing his “Déferlante”, a 10 m long fresco. For 3 days, he puts down his brushes in Rosa Bonheur’s open-air workshop: her park! And challenges himself to add 5 meters to his monumental canvas! He will be accompanied throughout his journey by musicians. Thus linking the 2 passions of Rosa Bonheur and Joel Person: music and painting.
This performance echoes Joël Person’s exhibition “Déferlante” held at the Loo & Lou Gallery from May to July 2021.
Photographer Jean-Christophe Ballot participates in the group exhibition “Carte Blanche” at the Cercle Suédois in Paris
Published on April 02, 2022
The Galerie Nathalie Béreau has organized an exhibition in the heart of a Haussmanien apartment on Rue de Rivoli, the Cercle Suédois, for the first time.
The main theme of this exhibition is nature in the broadest sense of the word with the participation of three artists working with different techniques: Jean-Christophe Ballot (photographs), Isabelle Tournoud (drawings), and Charles Hair (ceramics).
For this exhibition, Jean-Christophe Ballot proposes photographs from a trip he took in Australia in 2004. This includes images of the red desert in the center of the continent, the forest, or rocks from the northeast; images that suit the works by the other two artists wonderfully.
The Cercle Suédois was founded in 1891 in Paris. Established on the Rue de Rivoli, the center organizes events dedicated to Swedish traditions and culture (themed lunches, traditional parties…), as well as other gatherings connected to the zeitgeist (After Work, Thursday Apéro, brunches …) for members and their invited guests.
This year, the Swedish Art Association (AAS) celebrates its 65th anniversary. Close to the artists, the association is very active: organization of exhibitions, valorization of the collection of works created since the beginning of the “Cercle”, editions works of art each year, helps the exposed artists, and hosts artistic meetings and conferences.
Exhibition on view at the Cercle Suédois from April 6 – 22, 2022
Fred Kleinberg participates in the group exhibition “COEXISTER” at the Galerie Capazza
Published on April 4, 2022
From March 26 to June 26, 2022, Fred Kleinberg joins a group of artists at the Capazza Gallery for their new exhibition, Coexister.
Galerie Capazza is pleased to present this group exhibition that mixes represented and guest artists, and is in partnership with Galerie Arts d’Australie – Stéphane Jacob.
“Coexist. Pursue this idea and observe how many waves it will raise, how the radiations will reach the darkest shores. Coexist. To practice, to invite distant colleagues and artists, to propose an opening of the paths towards creation. Coexist. Works with four hands, works that evoke humanity. To coexist with nature, with the passing of time, with the interal or external storm. Several hundred answers have been made for this theme. To coexist in the discovery of the artworks, to pass, to exchange, to share, to be moved, to wonder…” – Laura et Denis Capazza-Durand
On the occasion of this group exhibition, Fred Kleinberg will present paintings from his Reborn series, produced between 2012 and 201. In his own words, this series “focuses on the power of the landscape, on the horizon, ramification, fluidity, change, and transformation. Nature wants to be speculum, mirror of the impulses and the instincts of the man.”
Exhibition on view at the Galerie Capazza from March 26 to June 26, 2022
Joël Person participates in the second issue of the magazine L’Amour, launched on 03.23.22 at the Palais de Tokyo bookstore
Published on April, 2nd 2022
For his second collaboration with the magazine L’Amour, Joël Person contributes eight drawings to accompany texts of Frederic Pajak.
The theme of this second issue of L’Amour is intimate: “Contre l’actualité”. In the same spirit as the first issue published in October 2021, various writers and artists are solicited to contribute in order to create a confrontation of opinions and feelings. This issue is intended “for a public that seeks to find itself in a daily life abused by the speeches and ideologies distorting public opinion” through the prism of art.
Now available in bookstores in Paris
The magazine L’Amour, brought by Les Cahiers dessinés, explores current events against the grain in various forms – short stories, diary entries, drawings, etc. The launch of this issue took place on March 23, 2022 at the Palais de Tokyo bookstore.
Frédéric Pajak is a writer, drawer, editor, curator and director, founder, and editor-in-chief of several magazines and journals featuring the work of writers and artists on specific themes.
Projection mapping by the artist Jean-Julien Pous on Saturday 2 October on the facade of the Town Hall of the 3rd arrondissement.
INSTANT KARMA
In his book Where Does the Dust Itself Collect, XuBing tells us:
– Body, Bodhi tree; heart, case of the light mirror. Rub again and again, without raising dust. If there was nothing to begin with, where would the dust come from?
Combining Line Oshin’s paintings, Maria Blowers’ animation and Audrey Poujoula’s music, Jean-Julien Pous evokes his deep attachment to his native land (China), the mugginess of summer’s spent there, the smell of flowers and decay exalted by the warmth of the perfumed harbor.The tree, a symbol of longevity and immortality in Hinduism and Buddhism, has an excellent feng shui and comes to life with the crested ibis, the bronze stournes and bats that it shelters.
Projected on the city hall of Paris Centre, its complex network of roots, like thousands of long wrinkled fingers, evoke in a carnal way the complex, painful and interconnected history of a population that counts in billions. In continuity with the surrounding nature of the Square du Temple – Elie Wiesel, it is like an open window on the other side of the mirror: the swan song of a wild nature that we have dried up and that bites us.
From 8pm to 2am
This project is supported by the Fondation Loo & Lou pour l’Art contemporain, under the aegis of the Fondation de Luxembourg
In the “Galleries – Art Market” section of the October 2021 magazine of Connaissance des arts magazine, an article by Marie Maertens on the exhibition Les Années Indiennes by Fred Kleinberg
The Artcité event will take place in Fontenay-Sous-Bois. Didier Genty’s works will be presented there for a month, with an exceptional opening of the NEF in the Halle Roublot on Saturday 25 September from 10am to 7pm on Sunday 26 September from 10am to 6pm. There will be a closing reception on Saturday 16 October at 5pm at Maison du citoyen.
The Biennale d’Issy is a contemporary art event that began in 1995, following one entitled Sud 92 which was created in 1984. It is at the heart of contemporary culture in Issy, supported and encouraged by the Mayor of Issy-les-Moulineaux.
Numerous cultural projects have been carried out during this event: the French Playing Card Museum (1997), the Cube (2001), the Ateliers des Arches (2002), and Les Arcades (2005).
Parallel to these new artistic centres, it was necessary to associate an event that brings together contemporary creation in the city, and is open to artists of all expressions and all nationalities. The challenge was met with a constantly increasing number of applications. Didier Genty’s works can be seen at the French Playing Card Museum in Issy-les-Moulineaux.
This exhibition includes some twenty contemporary artists, including eleven women artists. These artists, of all nationalities and from various disciplines (painting, sculpture, photography, art objects), express their questions through their artistic production. The figure of the horse is often a pretext for raising questions about oneself, others and society in general.
From 22 July to 7 November
The visit of the exhibition is included in the Haras du Pin visit, 9 euros for the normal rate and 8 euros for the reduced rate (free for children under 7).
Around forty works – paintings and sculptures – by the artist, a major figure of French expressionism, will be presented at the Capazza gallery.
This exhibition, curated by Yannick Mercoyrol (Director of Heritage and Cultural Programming at the Domaine National de Chambord), is on view in Nançay as an echo to the exhibition Arborescences by Lydie Arickx which will be held at the Château de Chambord, from May 30 to October 17, 2021, and for which the Galerie Capazza is a partner.
Opening hours of the exhibition at the Capazza gallery in Nançay : 24 July to 26 September : Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays / 10:00-12:30 and 14:30-19:00 Sunday 15 August : 10am-12.30pm and 2.30pm-7pm
Flaran Abbey invites you to discover the exhibition of Lydie Arickx (contemporary painting).
After studying at the Ecole supérieure d’Arts graphiques Penninghen, Lydie Arickx (1954-), a painter and sculptor of Flemish origin, has been taking part in international exhibitions and events since the 1980s. Recognised as one of the great French contemporary artists and supporting a militant approach to contemporary art made up of perpetual experimentation, it seemed natural that she should be welcomed at the Flaran Departmental Heritage Centre. This flagship exhibition of the summer offers, in the Cistercian spaces of the abbey church, not a retrospective but a refined communion with the place. These twenty painted and sculpted works from 1998 to 2018, with their unfeigned expressiveness, are a striking reflection of his multiple works.
Opening hours of the exhibition at Flaran Abbey : Until October 17, 2021: daily / 9:30-12:30 and 14:00-18:00
A collaboration with Aurélia Jaubert in the Atelier in November 2021
To make tapestry: “to remain in one’s place by being reduced to a decorative object” or “not to be invited to dance”… As a nod to this outdated expression, Aurélia Jaubert and the artists invited to take part in this exhibition place tapestry at the heart of contemporary issues and questions.
By reusing fragments of canvas or tapestry as well as certain artistic codes attached to this practice and then by diverting them, these artists reaffirm the creative capacity of this medium. Thus, tapestry is no longer just a decorative and popular object but once again becomes a “noble” art through which the artist expresses his contemporary view of the world and its representations, often with humour.
The origin of this exhibition project is Collection Grands maîtres, a tapestry designed in 2020 by Aurélia Jaubert and presented during the Objet-Textile Biennial at the Manufacture de Roubaix. Having received the museum prize on this occasion, this piece is the starting point for the presentation that will be devoted to Aurélia Jaubert’s textile work. Made from hundreds of pieces of canvas and tapestries collected here and there, assembled together in the manner of a collage, sewn into a sort of patchwork, Aurélia Jaubert’s tapestries form large frescoes. These frescoes can be described as “pop” since they are made up of hundreds of references to popular imagery and art history.
At the Manufacture, along with the four tapestries: Nativity (2019), Collection Grands maîtres (2020), Penelope Painting (2020), Untitled (2021), Aurélia Jaubert will also present two other series linked to textiles: SUPER VHS/Mixtape (2015-2016) and Rebuts d’atelier (2007-2010). These series bear witness to her research into diverted and ennobled materials, changes of scale and different forms of representation.
Alongside the work of Aurélia Jaubert, the work of four artists working in this medium will also be presented: Clarence Guena, Benoit Jammes, Paul York and Emmanuelle Villard. Through their approaches and the techniques they use, they also renew the art and perception of tapestry today.
From 26 June to 29 August
Free admission without reservation from Tuesday to Sunday from 2pm to 6pm
As an extension of the two exhibitions currently on view by Joël Person, Déferlante and Bruits du Monde, Loo & Lou Gallery is pleased to invite you on Friday, June 11th from 6 to 7 pm to a conversation that will be on Instagram live (@looandlou) between the historian and art historian (PhD/HDR) Agnès Callu (IIAC, EHESS/CNRS) and Joël Person on the topic
The Chamade, or The Perspectives of the Line
On this occasion, they will discuss the power of drawing strokes which, articulated in the manner of dynamic rhizomes, produce a drawing on the spot. The latter captures, in the shifted poetry of reality, a horse race with a classicising movimento at the same time as it cavalcades in a tempo as feverish as it is contemporary.
Friday June 11, 2021 6pm – 7pm
Sous le ventre d’un cheval emballé (exhibition catalogue), Joël Person, Haras national du Pin, 2020
Epistémologie du dessin, Concepts, readings and interpretations (XIX-XXIe siècles), Agnès Callu, Éditions Jacques André, 2021
Public performances during the exhibition “Arborescences”
Château de Chambord
Performances from May 19 to 25, 2021 from 4pm – 6pm With the support of the Loo & Lou Foundation
Published on May 14, 2021
The Arborescences exhibition at the Château de Chambord will be preceded by a residency during which Lydie Arickx will propose a public performance lasting several weeks. The artist regularly organises cultural events on major national stages (Art Sénat in 2001…) combining contemporary art and performance (creativity courses for schools, companies, hospitals…; cultural events, exhibitions, etc.) and it is quite natural that she will propose a performance during the spring residency which will precede the installation of the exhibition. For a week, under the watchful eye of schoolchildren who have come specifically but also of visitors, the artist will work on a gigantic 8 x 5.50 m canvas previously printed with Botticelli’s Spring. The result will be an integral part of the exhibition and will be visible to the public from 30 May.
Public performances from May 19 to 25, 2021, 4pm-6pm, on the second floor of the castle (included in the entrance fee) Release and signing of the manuscript “D’encre et d’encore” published by Diabase.
Sandro Botticelli, Spring, 1478-1482, 203 x 314 cm, Gallery of the Offices, Florence, Italy
New selection of available works by Johan Van Mullem
published the 7th of May 2021
P18010 (2018) Ink on canvas, 160 x 130 cm
A new selection of Johan Van Mullem’s works is now available and on view through the website. If you are interested in acquiring a piece, do not hesitate to contact us on contact@looandlougallery.com or by phone at 01 42 74 03 97.
An exhibition dedicated to Johan Van Mullem will be on view at the gallery in 2022.
Olivier de Sagazan’s show Ainsi sois moi questions the fact of being alive / Image: Olivier de Sagazan
More than a year after hosting Ainsi sois moi (then called Corps-Textes) in November 2019 at the Theatre, Olivier de Sagazan’s team is coming back to the stage, to let you (re)discover it in a revisited form.
After his visit to Saint-Nazaire, the artist and his company will fly to Italy to present:
Nature Contre Nature – Prints and drawings at the Taylor Foundation
Published on 5 October 2021
La Taille et le Crayon presents
Nature Contre Nature
with guest printmakers and designers
CEDRIC LE CORF – HELENE DAMVILLE – CLAIRE ILLOUZ (guest of honnor) – SARAH BARTHELEMY-SIBI – CAROLINE BOUYER – PAULINE BRAMI – MARIA CHILLON – CHRYSAV – VERONIQUE DESMASURES – PAOLA DIDONG – JEAN LODGE – IRIS MIRANDA – GUILLAINE QUERRIEN – FABIENNE SCHOULER
“Counter-nature means here the search for complementarities, for new sharing between us and things. The line promotes, not the landscape, but the plant form – bark, lichen, root, rhizome, branch, moss, leaf – as well as the animal or mineral form, and refuses any compromise with the blurring and erasure that may have haunted drawing and engraving.
It is this refusal of ideality that gives the feeling of a nature finally freed from the omnipotence of man to the point of confusion. Present in many of the works, the metonymic fragmentation of the sensible data succeeds in rendering the fullness of organic matter, without ever becoming exhausted in any nostalgia for the totality.
The drawings, engravings and sculptures in this exhibition invite us to strange encounters with nature.
Far from shrinking the visible, these works show the shadow of the sensitive world and its irremediable density. They are all attempts to no longer draw or paint “after nature” but with nature.
To achieve this, the artists have not sought to domesticate nature by means of the line or the point, but have preferred to lean against it, in order to make the line, the cut, the weaving or the crumpled, the instrument of a productive redoubling. They have chosen to situate themselves as close as possible to the plant world and its horizontal abundance, to go and meet the slopes and ridges that offer their improbable verticality to the eye, to hybridize plant material and mineral matter, to chase the memory of a woody form or an insect in flight.”
—Michel De Fornel,sociologist, linguist, director of studies at EHESS
Founded in Paris in October 2000 by a group of engravers, amateurs and art critics, motivated by the promotion of contemporary graphic creation, the association La Taille et le Crayon aims to highlight the richness of the creative relationships between drawing techniques and engraving processes.
Exhibition in the Atelier of the Taylor Foundation from 30 September to 23 October 2021
The catalogue of Joël Person’s exhibition at the Haras du Pin available for sale at the gallery
Published on 22 June 2021
Dear friends ,
We are pleased to announce that the catalogue of Joël Person‘s exhibition at the Haras du Pin Sous le ventre d’un cheval emballé is now available for sale at the gallery!
Foreword
The Haras National du Pin is pleased to welcome the exhibition of Joël Person. His nervous and delicate charcoal drawings lead us to a horse’s movements, from their morphology to the artist’s memories.
The exhibition “Joël Person, Sous le ventre d’un cheval emballé” (Joël Person, Under the belly of a wrapped horse) is aimed at all audiences and takes them on a sensitive journey to the heart of the equine world. Person’s universe has found the ideal setting in this place. Heritage and creation are definitely faithful allies in the service of the Orne and the people of Orne, especially young people.
— Christophe de Balorre, President of the Etablissement Publique du Haras national du Pin
Equus asinus
Joël Person is neither the first nor the last to draw horses. Numerous artists have devoted themselves to them, showing them alone and frozen in a pose, or else mounted by a rider too dignified, twisted in their nobility. I know nothing about the equestrian world and I don’t want to know anything about it: I am content to examine the drawings – my friend, the writer Paul Nizon, considers the horse to be “the taxi of man”. Poor beast, to be worked at mercy, “beast of burden” as we still say. What I see in Joël’s drawings, apart from the appeal to realism – which may seem outdated and even old-fashioned, whereas it is only timeless – is the enigma that emerges from these large equids drowned in pencil and charcoal.
— Frédéric Pajak
The book contains the works from the exhibition, as well as texts on the artist’s work, an interview, and a biography.
This catalogue is available for purchase at the gallery for 14.60€ ! Please contact us by emailor phone (+33) 01 42 03 97 if you would like more information about the book.
Joël Person — Dessins sur le vif et déferlantes, Open Ring, March 2021
“Born in 1962 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Joel Person graduated in 1986 from the Beaux Arts de Paris with honors. Always seeking to deepen his practice of drawing from live models, whatever his theme of predilection: horses, hair, bodies, erotic poses, portraits, news scenes or concerts, between classic line and intense concentration he seeks to render the resemblance with the outpouring of life. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, mainly in France and China, and has been purchased by many private and public collections, such as the Hermès collection (Paris Faubourg St Honoré, Dubai, Las Vegas, Shanghai) or the Jenish Museum in Vevey, Switzerland.”
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
Deep into the wild (II), 2021, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 100 x 81cm
Solaire, 2022, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 130 x 97 cm
Reflet nocturne, 2022, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 100 x 100 cm
Reflet(s) XII, 2022, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 130 x 195 cm
Deep into the wild, dessin #7, 2021, Graphit, charcoal, acrylic, color pen and oily pastel on paper, 40 x 30 cm
Reflet(s) XVII, 2022, Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 61 x 50 cm
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.
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.
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.
A constant state of poisoning, 2020, Collage and mixed media, 35 x 25 cm
Non ci resta che lavorare, 2022, Collage and mixed media, 27,3 x 35,5 cm
The boatbuilder, 2020, Collage, 28,8 x 21 cm
But does it float?, 2020, Collage, 28,8 x 21 cm
14:09, 2020, Collage and mixed media, 35 x 25 cm
Silent agreement, 2021, Collage and mixed media, 28,8 x 21 cm
The queer art of failure – tra il dire e il fare, 2022, Collage, 28,8 x 21 cm
You snooze you lose (me), 2021, Collage, 28,8 x 21 cm
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 – a beauty of which we do not know is the end or, as Rainer Maria Rilke once said, just “the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure.”
An intense wind blows on the Madonnas by Wilkening that fold their porcelain garments with a baroque gesture that appears to continue infinitely. Decadent and expressionist, shamanic and lyrical, these works are a hymn to a swaying and swarming sensation, an invitation to rid the urge of quick judgements.
Sometimes the sculptor creates her Madonnas ex nihilo from an erection of porcelain that she miraculously assembles – such as the bizarre piece, Le Papillon, evoking a disturbing version of Golgotha. 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.
She customizes them almost through voodoo, covering them with porcelain and glass, gold leaf and acacia branches. The large-format pieces impose themselves, grabbing the viewer’s attention. The viewer may be enticed to change their focus as they get closer to the sculpture, discovering worlds within worlds, and infinite forms wrapped in each fold of material. The base of the sculpture Mortel Immortel, which seemed from afar to be lace, turns out to be an accumulation of butterflies. It is a baroque universe where each volute and wing contains another form, and each of the works carries within it a set of worlds that is folded inside the other. The artist additionally recovers old fragments of forgotten sculptures that she integrates into her new works.
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 the extreme finesse of the porcelain. Wilkening holds the secret! Under the apparent softness and consistency of the white enamel, the chastity of the virgins quickly crumbles under a great pleasure that arises from our souls, revealing the violence of 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 any quick recognitions. The eye hesitates between the aerial, vegetal, and animalistic elements. Glass and porcelain become strange fabrics enveloping a Madonna who is no longer Catholic! 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 that were 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.
This exhibition, Les Chemins des Délices, witnesses the overabundance of an unfulfilled and restless life, taking ever further without the slightest bit of rest, the work of an artist who, in the figure of the Madonna, recognizes her fellow man, her sisters, and the mystery of fecundity and creation.
Benoît Luyckx has been creating sculptures out of stone with precision for more than forty years. He works with the actual size of the stone as it has it has been cut, and without the aid of an assistant nor new technologies. Though he is perpetually searching, the Belgian-born sculptor has developed a true signature style. His universal and powerful works are recognizable through the way he purifies and breathes life into robust stones that artists have been experimenting with for millennia.
At the heart of his work is the texture of stone, sometimes striated, natural, or smoothed, often with an aspect of minimalism. “I like calm, pure things,” remarked the artist. Luyckx enjoys venturing to quarries in France, Italy, or Belgium, treating them as open-air workshops in the middle of nature. He began his career with limestone, which is softer, before quickly turning to white marble, first from Carrara in Italy, then from Greece, before handling black marble from Belgium, until he eventually discovered Belgian blue stone for himself, which quickly became his favorite.
At Loo & Lou Gallery, Être en Nature unveils about twenty important works made over a period of ten years. The title works as a double meaning of a communion with nature and also of the simple notion of existing. Être en Nature is also the name of one of his sculptures: a graceful bust set in the abyss. The torso is a reoccurring theme in his work, and throughout the course of his career it begins moving towards an amplified purification, in order to signify the essence of being and its spirituality. This is the case of Nude Reverse, a torso in white marble, which with its conceptual forms reveals a smooth and veiled body endowed with soft curves, offering a sublimation of the feminine in a silent vibration. The juxtaposition between polished and rough gives life to the material and expresses the duality that inhabits it. Soft and Rock II is another perfect example of this idea. If the body is a guiding thread, Luyckx tends towards an appreciation of landscapes, where busts become more and more abstract, and give way to other forms from nature. It can be the subtle evocation of fields and the sensual dimension of undulating ears of wheat bending in the wind…
Most of his sculptures are on a pivot, turning and dancing on themselves, playing with light, shadow, and new perceptions. In Luyckx’s works, escape and reverie are the driving force behind creation free of interpretation.
There are artists who have a brutal inertia and others who are reclusively inclined, both symmetrical ways of separating art from life. This great modernist separation remains significantly followed. Separating oneself from the world and its breath, its increasing fragility, was never something Cedric Le Corf consented to. He does not practice detachment or indifference, and refuses to break with the natural order. The order itself, not merely its depiction: an order that is hard to define, irreducible to our reason, and all the more necessary to excavate from within, through the irrepressible energy of the shapes.
More than figurative, Cedric Le Corf’s sculptures, prints, and drawings consequently capture the heart, perhaps sacredly, through organic mystery in which we are merely the ephemeral passengers. What is it made of, this world, his world, which he himself calls baroque, out of expressionist choice and active listening of its elements, in which he seeks his proper place? The anatomy, both human and animal, seems to be the key player, and almost the implacable law from which derive all kinds of bones: skulls, jaws, limbs, fragments… If it were not for the fact that Le Corf employs materials, from wood to porcelain, which immediately restore the truth of his approach, one might say of Le Corf that he strips more than he sculpts.
His darkest works, which evoke Gericault and Delacroix (although there’s no banal mimicry), contain a tender, active, rough humour, which is not the effect of overly clever contrasts. Rather there is a suggestion, since there is an element of the baroque, of a sense of the circulations and mutations at the heart of which the vital forces victoriously confront the powers of suffering, doubt and death. It’s no secret that Le Corf’s curiosity has always taken him in the direction of those humanists most determined to understand the machinery of bodies and fluids responsible for such a miraculous operation. Michael Servetis, a martyr for truth, and Andreas Vesalius sit in his imaginary pantheon, as do the somewhat closer Philippe Etienne Lafosse, Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty and Honore Fragonard, cousin to the famous painter. In the ancient world, anatomy and dissection were one and the same: there was no alternative to opening up the body in order to understand. But what of art, where the “open form” often remains an excuse for works empty of any meaning. I like Le Corf’s response and his way of naturally reconnecting with the great Sevillians, from Montañés to the young Velazquez (beyond the Romantics and Baselitz). For them, depiction was suddenly threatened by its very realism, figuration by disfiguration. The boundaries gently fall away and, as Le Corf might say, bodies become landscapes. In blurring the kingdoms, anatomy comes to life and enchants us.
— Stéphane Guégan Scientific advisor to the Presidency of the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée de l’Orangerie
Hölderlin called it the “journey to the colony”. In order to find our origins, we must abandon them, forget them. Victor Ségalen, after exploring the Middle East and the Pacific, returned to Brittany. My journey is also marked by “steles”.
Imbued with a Rhenish heritage, from Dürer to Grünewald, and schools of polychrome wood, I penetrated the marine ode in my studio on the island of Groix, in Berlin, the laceration of German expressionism, then, in residence at the Academy of Fine Arts at the Villa des Pinsons in Chars, the landscapes’ tranquility of the Vexin painted by Corot. Then, as a member of the Casa Velázquez in Madrid, I discovered Spanish baroque and its worship of death, its sculptures painted with waxy flesh or enameled ceramics by Juan de Juni and Alonso Berruguete. And finally, the eternal return to the Celtic land where by a happy coincidence in the meandering Scorff Valley’s landscape, only a few steps away from the enclosures, the porz a maro (the gates of death), the famous dance of death of Kernascléden, and the marvelous rood screen of St Fiacre, I put my bag down and opened my workshops, an imaginary museum in the colors of the “Sarrazin”. A return to the source can only be accomplished if a poet sings, I had to take this detour, the foreign road to start over again without end.
— Cedric Le Corf
Losing the daily Midi; crossing courtyards, arches, bridges; try the branched paths; run out of breath at the steps, ramps, climbing ;
Avoid the precise stele; go around the usual walls; stumble ingenuously among these fake rocks; jump this ravine ; to linger in this garden; to go back sometimes,
And by a reversible lace finally mislead the quadruple sense of the Points of Heaven.
Elisabeth Daynès was born in 1960, and she currently lives and works in Paris. She is well known for her paleoart, and has exposed her sculptures in museums around the world, such as the Field Museum, Chicago; Perot, Dallas; Gyeonggi-do Jeongo Museum, Seoul; CosmoCaixa Science Museum, Barcelona; INAH, Mexico; Narodni Museum, Prague; Calouste Gulbekkian Foundation; Musée de l’Homme, Paris, etc.
For some dozens of years she has merged her scientific reconstructions with art, crossed by a reflection on the subject of the human figure in a contemporary world. Her first exhibition was dedicated to “La Vérité des Visages,” or “the Truth of Faces,” as she has began investigating identity and incarnation. She has followed these themes within a number of other exhibitions, such as Humans, Curieux face-à-face, Bouche B. In 2019, she participated in the art fair, “Art Up Lille,” and displayed her work in two exhibitions: the first at la galerie du jour agnès b. in Paris, and the second at the 836M Gallery in San Francisco. In 2020, Loo & Lou Gallery welcomes the exhibition, “Find yourself.”
For Elisabeth Daynès, the face is a place of mystery, the opposite of a simple surface that one could view as an ephemeral mask. In the piece Trash, abandoned faces are assembled in a multicolored mound, with red lips resembling flower petals that a distracted hand might have scattered. Fleeting masks that their owners had discarded, who were already taken by dreams of other faces. Here she questions if the lifespan of a face could be similar to one of a flower.
Faces or mirages? Versatile and volatile, these abandoned masks portray a measure of thirst for metamorphosis that agitates society. While science continues to offer us new possibilities, and the rewriting of oneself has become a planetary practice, the artist explores the limits of a future where appearance would be a ready-to-wear garment.
A face could be acquired in the same way and know the fate of any other object… that of being discarded. Elisabeth Daynès believes that the face is, on the contrary, the place for the expression of emotion and thought, as well as the the emergence of being. She embodies this in her hyperrealistic statues, which appear to be astonishingly real. This is made apparent by a plunge into an intense confrontation with lost identity. She expresses it in the woman peering the mirror in quest of her truth, or in the model with her closed eyes, signaling itself from her appeasement.
Poetics of the face are her focus: the celebration of the metaphysical power of a face in Identity, an ode to the vegetal in Les Ménines, and in the effervescent bouquets of blooming mouths. Focusing on one part of the body or the face, isolating and transforming it, Elisabeth Daynès has created surrealist fields of flowering red lips and breasts with tender shades of pink in an unusual nursery of mushrooms. She manages to sublimate anatomical detail by giving it poetic strength and creates an art in details where the detail becomes a world in itself. In this way, she teaches us that the face can become a landscape for those who know how to look at it…
Long before he can recall, Tanc has always considered writing as a refuge. As a young student, he would trick his teachers by filling the pages of his notebooks, not with notes, but with symbols that were as indecipherable as they were fascinating. Today, in the intimacy of his studio, Tanc has continued this mania but has adjusted it to his moods, influences, and current obsessions.
Referencing how the process triumphs over the result, Tanc relies heavily on his gestures, which are both frantic and spontaneous. Following his own rhythm, he uses pulses that evoke his memories, unraveling a language of emotion, regardless of its illegibility, using various materials and supports. The language is meant neither to be imposed on the viewer nor translated. Instead, we are encouraged to make our own interpretations. Although he is capable of engaging himself profoundly until exhaustion in a process, tool, form or style, the evolution of his work becomes clear thanks to his numerous series: the Spheres (an ode to spray paint) through to the series of Oscillations (an exploration in sketching), moving to pieces saturated with scratched and scribbled writing. These series by Tanc thus move towards a more complete array of abstraction. Oil paint is amassed onto the canvas directly from the tube, pressed and squeezed until it is finished, and place in a fashion similar to the stirring of tumultuous ocean waves.
Finally, Tanc’s work would not be entirely complete without a reference to music. As a composer himself, electronic music seems to stem from the same sincere and spontaneous creative process, with a similar sentiment: freedom. Similar to Paul Klee during his time who linked painting and music together, today Tanc explores the point where these two disciplines largely inspire and speak to one another.
Ceaselessly exploring his own psyche, Tanc has left a part of himself in his sonar and visual wakes. The hand that writes or draws, that composes or plays, no matter the words, within language and with writing, seems to be saying the same things.
The universe is an infinite body dressed in stern and thick paint. Waves of pure, discrete, and shameless energies spread on the canvas, surrendering to the fever of depths. Tana Borissova’s paintings represent a mental storm, the secret inner charms, where in every painting is an immense feeling.
They are wandering and sensual, mystical, astonishing and sumptuous, allusive, possessed, bitten by death-life in a skin-paint. Tracks of beings from the origins are splashed in the night, as marks of life. In the veils and the dark folds of Borissova’s work, appear from the end of times a stretched tension, the density of the night and a seizing and fitful source of presence. Thereby, inflamed bodies become sacred, thanks to the heavy-less troubled lights crossing the rarefied air of psychic rivers.
It’s the fire of the first embraces, where air is burning, where surfaces corroborate, where every sign become pure. Borissova’s thick skies absorb outlines and turn it into profound brumes, deconstructing the world. Feverish blues of the far reaches, exalt the inside of the human boundless matter. Drive into a corner, Borissova’s work is loaded to the bone. Color is not likened to surfaces anymore, but to thickness.
— Christian Noorbergen
le plus vieux jaillissement est un début donneur de possibilités il en fait sa cible l’invisible plus palpitant que le visible provoque la rencontre
vies et désirs entrechoqués nouvelle voûte céleste à chaque étincelle à chaque claquement de porte l’indomptable sauvage vitalité se cache sous la couche sereine de la peau
l’élan surgit de la fissure par les lèvres du temps dans le mouvement perd du rouge dans le passage perd du noir
Louise Frydman’s sculptures are presented in a space where they respond to each other until they reveal some aspects of the space, allowing the spectator to have a better understanding of the room. Thus the artist questions the existing link between art and architecture. She wants to remain direct and intimate with the public. She has a poetic vision of the world that invites the imaginary into spaces dedicated to art as well as those accessible to the greatest number of people. New questions and new sensitive experiments are aroused by the installation.
Here comes the humus’ season, of rot’s proliferation, of leafs’ maceration, by operation of the law according to which anything begotten will be in the proximity of excreting, organs of creation are being combined with those of urine, and everything that will be born will be wrapped by slime, mucus and blood, as well as asparagus’ purity and mint’s greenness comes from manure.
— Alejo Carpentier, extracted from Partage des eaux
Before man and its shape, before what will soon be the field of the original outlines and prints, out of infinity, breaks the wideness of a word fit to the arising of mankind: the landscape.
Man is not born yet or barely born and it has already been given the profusion of the landscape of its birth: mud dig by a shovel, a Garden of Eden molded with a punch, a fertile ground as thick as rough. Here is all it will require for mankind to prosper in its being and initiate its history: a vastness well furnished, slightly aggressive from the assault of the diggings, a land without borders, suitable to blossom of desire. There one word to describe it: silt.
It is the name of the matter as well as the kneading, the name of birth and of belonging. What arises from the protective cocoon is mankind in its primordial and definitive nakedness, holding onto the lean shape of the beginning and the slow length of the first days. Facing the landscape, and within it as well, as it would stand in front of its mother, it becomes the shape of its yearning and an opening for expectation. It can walk, subsequently, as night is fading.
Lydie Arickx draws and paints with a violence that is, rather, an expressive hyper sensibility. She fears not being able to create in a large way, and makes work using materials that work for her in that moment, be it with brushes, brooms, or her hands. She needs to be able to go hand-in-hand with her pieces, while experiencing a sort of struggle and groups herself with different materials and elements. Her work is focused on motifs that relate to consecrated expression. She pursues this inspiration through her pieces that she makes in the studio.
Her pieces are to be viewed as captured in an immediate confrontation between the world and human beings. Her large scale paintings and sculptures begin at a special moment of communion between object and experience, and are further developed.
Her large paintings of dissected human bodies or large oceans are above all examples of astonishingly large scale developments of her experiences, with all of their intensity. What is most striking is the sense of “coming and going,” a kind of repetition that occurs between them. No matter the scale, one could say that sincerity and truth reveal that the artist and her emotions are completely present within the works. Each moment her practice has its own purpose, even if it will be taken up again and placed into another experience. There is a way of being for the artist that cannot be improvised, that is probably not even spontaneous, but comes from an asceticism, a conquest of the self and of one’s sensibility.
What is also striking is that the strength of feeling does not envelop anything that is pathos. There is an excess of affect that blunts so many other expressionist approaches. The drawings of dissected bodies, to take the most perilous example, are exceptionally strong but also bear witness to a rejection of the mortuary and the macabre. They are poor human bodies transfigured by the vision of art, brought to another reality by the artist’s gaze. Here, as in the landscape drawings, there is a lyrical feeling. The subject triggers a vibration in the artist that leads to a transfiguration, and this transfiguration no longer brings us into the presence of this or that body but of the human and of life in general. Similarly, in Aux, the dance of death becomes the manifestation of the human in general. In the works by Arickx, the elements, nature, and life manifest through a temperament of fire and ice.
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.
Loo and Lou is pleased to announce its first participation in the Luxembourg Art Week contemporary art fair for its 2024 edition. On this occasion, the gallery will present a solo-show of works by 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.
Acquisition of the work “Confinement” by Joël Person by the Jenisch Vevey Museum in Switzerland.
Published on 24 April 2021
The work “Confinement” from the series “Les Verticales” is now a part of the permanent collection of the Musée Suisse Jenisch Vevey. It will be presented during the exhibition “Portrait, Autoportrait,” which was curated by Frédéric Pajak and assisted by Emmanuelle Neukomm, curator Fine Arts, and will be on view from May 29 to September 5, 2021.
For more information on the exhibition Portrait, Self-Portrait, click on this link: : Portrait, Selfportrait
Joël Person in residence at the Pablo Casals Festival from 30 July to 13 August 2021
Published on April 17, 2021
AN ARTIST IN ACTION
“The painter and illustrator Joël Person, a graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, will be live drawing the daily life of the festival, its public concerts, and its different atmospheres. It will be up to him to see and render with his hand what he has seen, to take the pulse of the event on paper. His work will be exhibited everyday in relation to the other events, because more than ever the Pablo Casals Festival will make room for interconnections and transdisciplinarity, so that the music may be experienced through all its facets.”
For more information on the Pablo Casals Festival, click here : Festival Pablo Casals
The term “expressionist” that is often attached to the work of Lydie Arickx is reductive. It is true that her work distorts the figure, twists the material and gives an account of the violence of the world. But her constant search for new materials and new forms nourishes her work beyond any label, in order to express fears, swallows, harsh joys or miraculous apparitions, sometimes with a touching gentleness. Whether she uses canvas, concrete, earth, metal, fabric, 3D prints, concrete or ash, Lydie Arickx transmits an unparalleled energy that makes her one of the most inventive and engaging artists. After her projects at the Cordeliers convent, the La Piscine museum, the Conciergerie and Biron, she will be offering a sensual and powerful exhibition at Chambord for four months, which will lead to a reflection on life and its forms, highlighting the porosity between the medium, the plant and the animal, each form inhabited by a breath that even death cannot complete, but simply entertain.
Arborescences will present around 150 works (drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, etc.) by the artist. Many of them were created specifically for the exhibition. The event will run from 30 May to 17 October, health conditions permitting. Two public performances by the artist will take place on the afternoons of 12 and 23 April on the second floor of the castle.
The “1 Immeuble, 1 Oeuvre” art program was launched in 2015 under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture, with the immediate support of the FPI, which has been accompanying its development for the past 5 years. Today, more and more FPI members are voluntarily committing, by signing the ministerial charter, to finance the acquisition or production of a work from an artist for each of their real estate programs.
In Thiais, Benoît Luyckx’s bronze sculpture faces Vinci Immobilier’s 1930s-inspired housing. The work invites the imagination and poetry through its purity of form and grace.
More information about “1 immeuble, 1 oeuvre” by the Ministry of Culture and the Federation of Real Estate Developers of France: https://www.unimmeubleuneoeuvre.fr/
Release of the book Impermanence by Catherine Wilkening
Published on 11 March 2021
Dear friends ,
We are pleased to announce the imminent release of the book Impermanence by Catherine Wilkening.
“Twenty years ago, to an actress who was proudly showing off photos of her sculptures during a film shoot, I replied: “I’ve been sculpting for years too, but in my head… I take some clay and I throw it on a wall, I create shapes, I imagine… in my head.” It’s as if I was waiting for something to happen, a shock, to allow me to give flesh to my dream, to dare to put my hands in the material. Since then I have never stopped sculpting, challenging my curiosity further and further, creating dozens of sculptures, more and more audacious, both in size and in structure…”
– Catherine Wilkening
This book offers magnificent impressions of the artist’s sculptural work over two decades as well as texts written by critic Philippe Godin.
This singular object will be available for purchase from Tuesday 16 March at the gallery for €25!
Do not hesitate to contact us by email or phone (+33) 01 42 03 97 if you want more information about the book Impermanence.
We are delighted to present to you a brand new online catalog with works available under 1000 euros.
We have also begun listing a selection of available works for each exhibition on our website. If you are interested in pieces from our current or previous exhibitions, please do not hesitate to contact the gallery.
We invite you to consider acquiring a piece and supporting artists who have been impacted heavily by this health crisis.
Please do not hesitate to contact us by e-mail or telephone (+33) 01 42 03 97 if would like more information on the pieces and/or artists represented by Loo & Lou Gallery.
Louise Frydman is featured in the new edition of the book “1 immeuble, 1 œuvre.” The artist obtained the prize “1 immeuble, 1 œuvre” in 2019 for her works Forêt blanche and La Fée des pétales.
More information about the “1 immeuble, 1 oeuvre” device of the French Ministry of Culture and the Federation of Real Estate Developers of France: https://www.unimmeubleuneoeuvre.fr/
Catherine Wilkening joins a group exhibition at the Naïa Museum of Imaginary Arts in Rochefort-en-Terre (Brittany). Inaugurated in March 2020, it will be on view until March 2021.
“The works of the artist are veritable ossuaries testifying to a war pursued relentlessly, with regard to the great macho fabulations which populate our memories (not only the cinematographical ones…) An aberrant ode to cannibalism !”
On the occasion of the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the inscription of the Loire Valley on the UNESCO World Heritage List, the Val de Loire Mission presents a collective exhibition at the castle of Tours.
Photographs by Jean-Christophe Ballot will be presented during this exhibition. Imola Gebauer and Bruno Marmiroli – curators of the exhibition – have retained the work he had done on the floods of the Loire, published in the book L’eau grande, published by Créaphis.
The exhibition is on view until January 17, 2021, from Tuesday to Sunday from 2 to 6 pm.
Loo & Lou Gallery George V 45 avenue George V, 75008 Paris
published 16th October 2020
The photography exhibition “Secrets and Lies” by Amy Gibson is on view at our George V space from Tuesday to Saturday, 11am – 7pm, until October 30th by appointment via secretsandliesrsvp@gmail.com.
The gallery will be open all day on Tuesday, October 27th from 11am to 7pm.
“Everyone has inside of them a princess, a king, a monster, an idiot, and a hero. When we enjoy and have fun pretending to be these characters we access part of ourselves that has been there all along.”
07.10.2020 – Drawings by Paul de Pignol, published in number 18 of the Cahiers de l’école du paysage de Blois
VOLUME Bookshop – 47 rue Notre dame de Nazareth, 75003 Paris
published on October 1st 2020
The bookshop VOLUME will host this Wednesday, October 7th at 7:30 pm an event to launch the issue of the number 18 of the Cahiers de l’école du paysage de Blois. Dedicated to the measure of the living (la mesure du vivant), it contains 6 drawings by Paul de Pignol.
The Árvore Residence Award was created in 2019 and aims to promote ceramics as an autonomous language of contemporary artistic creation. One of this initiative’s objectives is to support the continued study of creative and research work of visual artists in this field.
In 2020 the Prize for Artistic Residency – JUSTMAD was awarded, which in its editions has a program of artistic residencies oriented towards artistic creation. Thus, after a meeting with members of the management of Árvore – Cooperativa de Actividades Artísticas, CRL and Semíramis Gonzalez, artistic director of the contemporary art fair JUSTMAD, which took place last February in Madrid, they decided to reward the French artist Louise Frydman.
The pieces produced during the artist’s residency will be part of the artist’s solo exhibition in rooms 2 and 3 of the Árvore from 10 to 31 October 2020.
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.
The exhibition presents four works dispersed in time and space.
Thirty-seven years have passed between his first trip to Berlin in 1983 and the new urban landscapes of the winter of 2019/2020.
Between the portraits of Buddha in Burma and the landscapes of the road to Santiago de Compostela through France and Spain, between the inner journey of the Vanities, still lifes, installations or observation of funeral rites in Toraja country, Jean-Christophe Ballot holds a sensitive line carried by a contemplative look at the world.
Practical information :
From September 5th to October 11th, 2020
Maison Henri IV. Quai de la Batellerie, Saint Valery en Caux, 76460 France
We are happy to announce our participation in ARTS+MÉTIERS, a festive week of discoveries (discover galleries, selections of artworks for sale below 1 000 €, special offers in stores and restaurants, workshops) from July 4th to 11th on Rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth and in its surrounding neighborhood, Arts et Métiers.
Are you a playful and supportive soul? Return to childhood by participating in the raffle and you could go home with works of art, books, a tailor-made cocktail, or even a bouquet of seasonal and ethical flowers, and discover, or rediscover, the neighborhood in a playful way.
For the raffle, we are offering two catalogues by Lydie Arickx that are worth 55 € each.
Tickets are currently for sale for 5 € at the gallery and all proceeds will go to the neighborhood association of Paris-Centre that works for the reintegration and support of artists and creators who are in difficult situations.
ART PARIS DIGITAL • ART PARIS LIVE • ART PARIS HORS LES MURS
published May 30, 2020
We invite you to discover our virtual stand in the 100% digital edition of Art Paris 2020. For this edition, Loo & Lou Gallery is pleased to present a view of the French scene, faithful to its artistic line, with four artists: Pierre-Édouard, Cédric Le Corf, Paul de Pignol, and Hélène Damville. Though their materials and 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.
The photographer Jean-Christophe Ballot will take part in the conference “La photographie aujourd’hui et demain”, which will be held at the Petit Palais on June 12, 2018.
Photographers Stéphane Couturier and Julien Lescoeur will participate in this conference, which will be hosted by Susana Gállego Cuesta.
It will take place on June 12, 2018 at 12:30 pm at the Petit Palais.
We are delighted to announce our participation in the 2024 edition of the Art Madrid contemporary art fair with the duo-show by Cedric Le Corf and Joël Person.
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.
JOËL PERSON
“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 2024 edition of the JustMad contemporary art fair in Madrid.
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)
We are pleased to announce our participation at 2023 edition of African Art & Design Fair AKAA in Paris.
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.”
We are pleased to announce our participation in the 2023 edition of the contemporary art fair JUSTMAD in Madrid.
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.
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
JOËL PERSON
“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.
JOHAN VAN MULLEM
Johan Van Mullem was born in Congo in 1959 to Belgian parents. He grew up moving around the world as a result of his parents various diplomatic postings, including a seven year stay in Tunisia. The artist has always been an autodidact. He started drawing at the age of five and never stopped, following in his father and grandfather’s footsteps. His family roots are in the city of Bruge, and from which he went on to study architecture in Brussels. Later on, Johan began exploring with etching and painting. Today he paints with etching ink, and is considered to be one of the only artists who uses this medium as a way to create paintings.
Since his youth, Van Mullem has persisted in his search for wrinkled faces, seeking the beauty that he recognized in the experience that is “engraved” on faces and in hands. Since then, the face remains the major subject of his work. The subjects appear rejuvenated, disappearing or emerging in a halo of light in an old-fashioned sfumato, offering an escape into a world of emotion. His work is an invitation to look inward and go on a journey of omnipresent emotional charge of which one cannot part ways indifferently, an effect of the bewildering depth of his paintings.
The superimposition and erasure of many smooth layers of diluted inks further accentuates the feeling of viewing a presence on the canvas that is difficult to describe. Van Mullem has mastered this specific and unique technique through self-learning, executing his pieces in etching ink as an extension of his experience as an engraver, giving his work an additional, exceptional character.
A multifaceted artist, designer, poet, musician, painter and sculptor, Van Mullem strives to create a diverse but absolutely coherent œuvre that builds bridges to link and awaken our senses. Though his pieces are contemporary, they can suggest references to historical masterpieces.
His paintings are in major private collections and Museum collections throughout Europe. He has held solo exhibitions in Art Galleries located in London, Paris, New York and Brussels. His work was exhibited in various European Museums.
We are pleased to announce our participation in the 2022 edition of the contemporary art fair JUSTLX in Lisboa.
CATHERINE WILKENING
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
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
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
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 Uniquein 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.
JOHAN VAN MULLEM
Johan Van Mullem was born in Congo in 1959 to Belgian parents. He grew up moving around the world as a result of his parents various diplomatic postings, including a seven year stay in Tunisia. The artist has always been an autodidact. He started drawing at the age of five and never stopped, following in his father and grandfather’s footsteps. His family roots are in the city of Bruge, and from which he went on to study architecture in Brussels. Later on, Johan began exploring with etching and painting. Today he paints with etching ink, and is considered to be one of the only artists who uses this medium as a way to create paintings.
Since his youth, Van Mullem has persisted in his search for wrinkled faces, seeking the beauty that he recognized in the experience that is “engraved” on faces and in hands. Since then, the face remains the major subject of his work. The subjects appear rejuvenated, disappearing or emerging in a halo of light in an old-fashioned sfumato, offering an escape into a world of emotion. His work is an invitation to look inward and go on a journey of omnipresent emotional charge of which one cannot part ways indifferently, an effect of the bewildering depth of his paintings.
The superimposition and erasure of many smooth layers of diluted inks further accentuates the feeling of viewing a presence on the canvas that is difficult to describe. Van Mullem has mastered this specific and unique technique through self-learning, executing his pieces in etching ink as an extension of his experience as an engraver, giving his work an additional, exceptional character.
A multifaceted artist, designer, poet, musician, painter and sculptor, Van Mullem strives to create a diverse but absolutely coherent œuvre that builds bridges to link and awaken our senses. Though his pieces are contemporary, they can suggest references to historical masterpieces.
His paintings are in major private collections and Museum collections throughout Europe. He has held solo exhibitions in Art Galleries located in London, Paris, New York and Brussels. His work was exhibited in various European Museums.
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.
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
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.
OLIVIER DE SAGAZAN
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
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
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
HÉLÈNE DAMVILLE
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-ÉDOUARD
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
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.
Loo and Lou Gallery participated in the 2020 edition of JustMad in Madrid, Spain during which four artists were presented: Flo Arnold, Dan Barichasse, Amélie Ducommun and Louise Frydman.
AMÉLIE DUCOMMUN
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.
FLO ARNOLD
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
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
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…).
In September 2019, the 15 artists of the 90th class of the Académie de France in Madrid moved into the studios of the Casa de Velázquez. Through the follow-up of their creative residency, we were able to witness the birth of new works, linked to the project that each of the residents had proposed as the main theme of their year in Spain. The first lines of force of a work in progress were already emerging, taking shape, evolving and sometimes mutating from month to month. They invited Claire PERESSOTTI – author and winner of the 2019 Madrid Prize – to accompany them in the adventure through a text that she created especially for them, inspired by the conception of the exhibition.
Hybrid and multiple, AT3LI3R V3LÁZQU3Z was above all a curatorial experiment by the artists themselves. By moving the creative process from Madrid to Paris, from the Casa de Velázquez to the Atelier of the Loo & Lou Gallery, it is indeed at the heart of a work in progress, with shifting lines, that the artists have proposed to immerse us. Drawing its inspiration from Matisse’s The Red Studio, the central concept of the exhibition established a mirror game between the space of creation and the space of display. The works were intermingled with objects of various kinds, as transitional elements between the act of creating and that of exhibiting. By lifting the veil on what usually takes place in the intimacy of the studio, the exhibition invited us to dive into the heart of the artistic process by giving us a lively overview of the work in residence.
Visible from 17 to 31 January 2020 at the Atelier of the Loo & Lou Gallery (Paris, 3rd arrondissement), AT3LI3R V3LÁZQU3Z was also an opportunity for a new synergy with a place which, like the Casa de Velázquez, aims to be an incubator for innovative practices and a creative laboratory. While support for artists obviously involves day-to-day assistance, it is also based on the weaving of quality collaborations that, year after year, build a solid distribution network committed to young contemporary creation.
THOMAS ANDREA BARBEY (drawing), JONATHAN BELL (music composition), PIERRE BELLOT (painting), MARINE DE CONTES (film), HUGO DEVERCHÈRE (sculpture), CLÉMENT FOURMENT (engraving), ÉTIENNE HAAN (music composition), SARA KAMALVAND (architecture), LETICIA MARTÍNEZ PÉREZ (visual arts), BENJAMIN MOULY (photography), FRANCISCO RODRÍGUEZ TEARE (video), GUILLAUME VALENTI (painting), KEKE VILABELDA (visual arts), JUSTIN WEILER (painting), KATARZYNA WIESIOLEK (drawing)
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
Nativité, 2019, Assembled and sewn canvases and tapestries, 378x217cm
Nativité (détail), 2019, Assembled and sewn canvases and tapestries, 378x217cm
Nativité (détail), 2019, Assembled and sewn canvases and tapestries, 378x217cm
Nativité (détail), 2019, Assembled and sewn canvases and tapestries, 378x217cm
Nativité (détail), 2019, Assembled and sewn canvases and tapestries, 378x217cm
Nativité (détail), 2019, Assembled and sewn canvases and tapestries, 378x217cm
Louise Frydman is a French artist born in 1989 in Paris.
She graduated from ESAG-Penninghen School of Art in 2012 and studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York. Her studio is located in Burgundy since 2015. Louise began by composing light and delicate works in white paper and then turned to ceramics in 2015 when she created her monumental piece “La Fée des Pétales” hanging in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Croisilles in Paris.
In her treatment of ceramics, she will preserve the white matte of the paper as well as the fineness of the material. Her sculptures, or installations, inspired by the forms of nature, play with light and movement. Her meeting with the ceramist Jean-François Reboul in 2015 allows her to deepen her learning and to assert herself in her artistic approach. She exhibits her work in 2017 and 2019 at the biennial Revelations at the Grand Palais in Paris. Louise now collaborates with luxury houses and works with renowned architects around the world. In June 2019, Louise Frydman was awarded the “1 immeuble, 1 œuvre” prize by the French Minister of Culture Franck Riester, for her collaboration with Vinci Immobilier. Her work was also selected for the ICAA International White China Competition, whose exhibition took place in Beijing in August 2019.
Since 2015 the Parisian gallery Amélie Maison d’Art represents her work. The Loo & Lou gallery has exhibited her work at JustLX in Lisbon in May 2019 and JustMad in Madrid in 2020. It is in this context that she won the Résidence Arvore prize which allowed her to make a residency leading to an exhibition in Porto. In 2021 we presented the second solo exhibition of Louise Frydman Céramique Contemporaine in our space on Avenue George V.
Efflorescence II (2020) Wall sculpture, Faïence émaillée, D 60cm
Corolle II (2020) Wall sculpture, Ceramic, L 54 x I 53 x H 12 cm
“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.”
Benoît Luyckx is a French contemporary artist who was born in 1955. After graduating from the École Boulle in 1976, he continued his studies at the Beaux-arts de Paris, before fully devoting himself to sculpture. It was during this time that he began exploring different quarries, where he saw the famous Carrara marble in Italy, as well as in Belgium, for the first time.
Luyckx transposes his thoughts in mineral (stones and marble) which he sculpts according to their size. Inspired by great, universal themes such as infinity, modernity, nature, and the body, he goes beyond materiality, constantly shifting between the figurative and abstraction.
The artist holds great interest in the movement and dynamics of his sculptures where, despite their material, they appear to be lightweight. He expresses his views on nature through a juxtaposition of raw material that has been polished and ribbed. His trips to the United States in the 1980s have inspired him particularly in his interpretation of modernity. If one were to consider the periods of his career, one could interpret his work as modernist, architectural, spiral, vegetal, or organic.
He has collaborated with Hermès, Chanel’s head office in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the Evreux Courthouse, the French Embassy in Phnom Penh (Cambodia), Moët & Chandon, HSBC, Vinci, Eiffage, among others, and worked with architects Paul Chemetov, Adrien Fainsilber, Jean-Pierre Lott, Pierre-Yves Rochon, Philippe Starck, Juan Trindade and the Pinto agency.
Luyckx has exhibited in various galleries in Europe and several times in the United States. His work is presented in several important private collections and Foundations.
International Emerald Museum and Loo & Lou Gallery Bogota, Colombia
02.05 – 31.05.2017
View of the exhibition Urpflänze, Museo Internacional De La Esmeralda, Bogota, Colombia / Image: Guillaume Krattinger
Sans Titre, 2015, Gelatine-bromide print on vegetable leaf (gunnera manicata), 210 x 240 cm
View of the exhibition Urpflänze, Museo Internacional De La Esmeralda, Bogota, Colombia
View of the exhibition Urpflänze, Museo Internacional De La Esmeralda, Bogota, Colombia
Sans titre, Gelatine-bromide print on vegetable leaf (gunnera manicata), 210 x 240 cm
View of the exhibition Urpflänze, Museo Internacional De La Esmeralda, Bogota, Colombia
View of the exhibition Urpflänze, Museo Internacional De La Esmeralda, Bogota, Colombia
View of the exhibition Urpflänze, Museo Internacional De La Esmeralda, Bogota, Colombia
View of the exhibition Urpflänze, Museo Internacional De La Esmeralda, Bogota, Colombia
On the occasion of the France-Colombia Year 2017, the International Emerald Museum will host, from 02.05.17 to 31.05.17, URPFLANZE an exhibition by French artist Dominique Lacloche.
After GURU, which was held in September 2015 in its spaces in the Haut Marais and Avenue George V, this is the second collaboration with the artist. This new exhibition is part of the Hors les Murs program for the first time. The Loo & Lou gallery, which will celebrate its second anniversary in June, continues its development with the objective of pursuing its commitment to the artists it has been defending since its creation.
“I am beginning to become aware of the essential form with which nature always plays, and from which it produces its great variety.”
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Shortly before Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe published “The Metamorphosis of Plants” in 1790, he engaged in an epistolary exchange with Charlotte Von Stein in which he described the archetypal plant, or the Urpflanze.
This became the fundamental work of Dominique Lacloche and Goethe’s Urpflänze confirmed an already present intuition. The idea that an organism, through metamorphosis, is capable of adopting all the forms that our imagination can conjure up interests her. For the Musée International de l’Émeraude, the artist proposes an imposing staging of this Jurassic rhizome, cutting the exhibition space into a labyrinth of giant fractals, confronting the viewer with the monumental as well as the detail of the fiber. Working in such a way that the photographic material and the organic material merge with the epidermis, Dominique Lacloche has created a new type of living object.
These are chimeras that are given to the visitor to see when he enters the exhibition room…
