Here we find James Ensor’s extrospective humour, with his way of distorting reality to better expose its flaws. His characters—often represented by testicles—much like the masks of Ostend, sneer at the world’s emptiness. But where Ensor screams, Baele also knows how to be silent, evoking a philosophy of the daily life where the arrangement of objects becomes a scene of profound mystery.

In this series, Casanova becomes a melancholic alter ego. Bart Baele does not paint the conquest, but the moment when the seducer finds himself alone before his mirror, stripped of his artifice. This is where the artist distinguishes himself, transforming the darkness of his thoughts into ironic material. His painted scenes are like confessions, and the colors used like scars.

Despite the heavy emotional weight, irony is never far away. Bart Baele finds amusement in his own torments and invites the viewer not to take despair at face value. The Casanova Paintings is an invitation to understand our own paradoxes: we are all, in some way, Casanovas of the mind, desperately seeking a beauty that eludes us, all while laughing at our own failures. A crude and beautifully human exhibition.

As the title suggests, this exhibition and publication will take you on an astonishing journey through the artist’s career. The pluralism that reigns in contemporary art can be confusing. That is why today is a special moment to be able to overview 40 years of creativity and audacity for the artist who is considered as the  » king of street art in France  »
While many changes have taken place among painters in recent years, Speedy Graphito has consistently and coherently pursued the pictorial research he began 42 years ago.
In 1984, Speedy Graphito began expressing himself on the streets by spray-painting his character Dédé the Demon on walls using stencils. From 1985 onwards, the artist developed this character into an angel, a demon, and a horseman (notably for the event La Ruée vers l’Art, launched by the then Minister of Culture Jack Lang).
This multifaceted, free, and autonomous work invites us at each exhibition to look towards a new language. Gifted with insatiable artistic curiosity and creative drive, Speedy Graphito has experimented with (and mastered with success)
several techniques: stencils or murals, engraving, screen printing, photography, wood carving, ceramics, theater set design, music,
poetry, video… and, of course, painting on canvas.  .
This variety of techniques is not intended to show off; it serves only to give shape to an astonishing faculty of imagination.
Although Speedy Graphito’s art was born on the streets and then developed in parallel in his studio, since childhood (at the age of 12 he was making copies of Vlaminck) as his main source of inspiration: his personal pantheon, the untouchable artists, the adored,
those whose practice he mistrusts, and those who have always amazed him and shaped his life. A dream team of art brought together under his brushes.
A daring creator who continues to embody the spirituality of street art, Speedy Graphito breaks down all barriers. Retaining the essence of his forefathers’ works, he examines them, dissects them, invites them to his street artist’s table, gives them a second
life and a new form of existence, intelligently adding the imagery of mass culture.)
Painting is an art, but not all painters are artists. Speedy Graphito is, and the sequence of superbly accomplished series he has produced over the first forty years of his career proves it. The quality of an
artist depends on how he tells a story. And Speedy Graphito conveys these stories, ours and that of art, with an ease that is unique to him. Each painting is painted as if it were the most important of his life. A declaration of love for the medium.
Jean Renoir, the filmmaker, said: “Our job is to look and open windows.” Speedy Graphito, a keen observer, looks at the history of
art, his history, our ever-changing world, in a wonderful way, and opens wide new windows that are just waiting for us to see what he sees. After all, isn’t it the role of the artist to continue to surprise us?

In a subtle balance between abstraction and figuration, he composes images in his studio that evoke the familiar places, the streets of which he has been wandering since his childhood. Each day unfolds in colour for Nathan Bertet, who works on dozens of canvases simultaneously, which are closely arranged in his studio, keeping every scene within sight. Avenues, parks, housing estates and hills appear as singular perspectives of his home town. Polysemous and untitled, his works are open to interpretation. He paints small formats: voluptuous and harmonious mental images, in an effort to reaffirm memory without photographic support. For him, the almost mechanical perseverance of memory is essential; if it’s hesitant or it wavers, he has to physically return to the place of the memory to confirm his intuition.

Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory[1] is a key work in understanding the painter’s practice. Within his book, Bergson explores memory and the relationship between the body and the mind, proposing that the past survives in two ways: through both motor mechanisms and independent memories. Nathan Bertet’s work mobilises these two forms of memory: the spontaneous memory of the image, appearing suddenly as a precise moment in time, which he then transposes into his painting; and the mechanical memory, where, through an almost mnemonic effort, he fixes his images in the studio, independently of their source, in an act of voluntary recall. Similar to a darkroom, his studio becomes a place where memory is revealed.

Far removed from a capitalist and “instagrammable” vision of exoticism and a far away land, Nathan Bertet pays homage to Palaiseau, a town steeped in his own intimate memories. He is an artist who loves to return to the places he travels through. He’s always in a hurry to get back to them, a haste accompanied by a joyful desire to experience familiarity at last. Everyday life, an ordinary, unobtrusive backdrop, forms a continuous, shared thread upon which all our past experiences and temporalities settle, until an extraordinary detail emerges, revealing the hidden depths of banality. The artist’s work can be situated within this interstice: Nathan Bertet provides a fresh perspective on the everyday. By untangling himself from the tumult of the present, he is able to summon the past, appreciate that which is useless, and cultivate the luxury of dreams.

The question of time and duration lies at the heart of Nathan Bertet’s radical practice, for whom each canvas is an act of resistance in the face of contemporary immediacy. His method of creation, spanning over two years, defies the imperatives of speed and productivity. He painstakingly superimposes layers of pure pigment, sometimes applying just a few strokes a day, before letting each layer dry, with a deep appreciation of the moments of painting. Inspired by the Venetian masters and American minimalism, Nathan Bertet strikes a delicate balance between representation and expression, between the presence of the object and the force of the gesture.

“Time is this very hesitation”[2], and it is precisely within this gap that his gesture is situated: Nathan Bertet deliberately lengthens time, drawing out each stage to intensify its depth. He positions himself out of step with time, refusing to intensify the rhythm of his creation. His work obliges one to slow down, affirming that art, far from yielding to the pressures of the market, can be a space where each moment deepens, unfolds, and where slowness becomes a force of revelation.

[1] Berson Henri, Matter and Memory, Paris, PUF, coll. Quadrige, 2012

[2] Berson Henri, The Creative Mind, Paris, PUF, coll. Quadrige, 1985

For the artist, the idea is not to paint a model in a traditional sense, through poses and artifice, as has occurred throughout art history, but to attempt to capture an individuality, a particular presence, usually through a “non-pose,” with the model choosing to get involved or not. This distinctive approach rejects any staging by painting directly from life, far from social constructions or mediations imposed by contemporary gazes.

Nothing in Alun Williams’s paintings is quite what it seems to be – or to put it more accurately, there is a lot more to everything than we might think at first acquaintance. Williams’s apparently straightforward recent works can seem to depend on the artist’s ability to invent wholly contemporary, engaging images – irresistible but unsentimental donkeys in a landscape, for example – and to exploit the physical expressiveness of his materials – roughly stroked paint on a coarse support or fluid ink on paper. But we soon become aware of the rigorous conceptual basis, at once deeply serious and playful, that informs these works. Williams comments on our present condition, in part by forcing those of us who pay attention to art to search our mental image banks, happily recognizing familiar works of art or struggling to retrieve obscure ones. What is it about that landscape background that seems familiar? Why do I feel that I’ve seen that setting not long ago? Isn’t that figure something I know from another context? In his most recent works, we are also forced to think about the ubiquitous media images of present day horrors.

That sense of fleeting familiarity is not an illusion. Williams deliberately rings changes on motifs from other works of art, as well as images of real places. It’s not appropriation but rather something closer to the way T.S. Eliot allowed his broad knowledge and appreciation of the literature of the past to resonate in his writing. Much of Williams’s earlier work was informed by scrupulous research into the history of locations he frequented or the neighborhoods of places where he exhibited or worked. He would discover a configuration – a paint stain or roadmark or inflection in a wall, among many other sources – that became a surrogate for a leading personage in the history. The configuration, now an autonomous character, was depicted in images based on the generating location, sometimes in the company of other characters in the story. Often, a related group of works would present several moments in the life of the protagonist, whom we learned to recognize in various settings.

Williams’ recent works are no less layered and allusive. They seem to have been stimulated equally by his knowledge of the history of art, especially modern art, and the disturbing state of our troubled world. The alarming news from the mid-east has been encapsulated by odalisques who appear to be refugees from the fictive North African Arcadia that Henri Matisse constructed with props and textiles in his Provençal studio. The newly energetic women gather in a group, armed with assault rifles, or sit amid the rubble in the aftermath of a bombing raid, subverting any lingering associations with an idealized world of idleness and pleasure. Donkeys, based on representations from artists as disparate at Franz Marc and Jean-Michel Basquiat, become ambassadors for everything from animal welfare, to brute labor, to endurance, to patience, at the same time that they remind us that they are symbols of the American Democratic party. In the apparently bucolic Crisis of Democracy #2 (Thomas Paine meets John Adams) (2023), two leading figures in the American Revolution, represented by dramatically different surrogates, shake hands in front of a New England house, watched by sympathetic donkeys.

Elsewhere we find everything from elusive echoes to forthright reinventions of such wide-ranging sources as 17th century landscape painting and the work of John Constable, Vincent van Gogh, George Grosz, and Max Ernst, unified by Williams’s vigorous touch and evocative orchestration of hues. The images that serve as points of departure range from the familiar to the obscure. Whatever the starting point, Williams treats it with insouciance and invention, so that we are as engaged by his transformation of his sources as we are by recognizing or sensing the origin of the image. We are fascinated by the tension between the associations provoked by the usually benign source images and Williams’s insertions and alterations, which can range from personages from the art world to explosive suggestions of destruction. An allusion to a Constable landscape, for example, is almost overwhelmed by an image derived from recent media coverage of war. We are confronted by absorbing metaphors for the state of the world, perhaps even for the artist’s role in these troubled times as someone who bears witness, at the same that we are reminded, now overtly, now subliminally, of the long, enduring history of visual art. There’s no such ambiguity about the iterations of a jaunty, grotesque, cigarette-smoking Angel of War, conjured up in various material guises, at once sinister and bitterly funny. Once again, Williams has invented a memorable “character” who embodies complex meanings in a kind of visual shorthand, a potent emblem of our disturbing moment.

The art world, particularly the world of modernist icons, comes under scrutiny as well. Williams has updated Max Ernst’s Au Rendez-vous des Amis, his 1922 homage to nascent Surrealism. Painted two years before the publication of André Breton’s first manifesto defining the movement and named for a café, the large canvas presents portraits of fifteen of Ernst’s friends and colleagues, including Breton, Giorgio de Chirico, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, and his wife Gala, plus (presumably as precursors) Fyodor Dostoevsky and Raphael, as well as a self-portrait of the artist. Williams has substituted more recent pivotal figures in his version of the painting, New York Rendezvous: Joan Mitchell, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, Marcel Duchamp, Barnett Newman, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Jeff Koons, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Nancy Spero. Where possible, Williams has based his representations on extant self-portraits; where no prototype exists, as for Pollock, he has invented an image derived from the artist’s work. Paul Cézanne, standing in Dostoevsky, is derived from a portrait of the artist by Dan Flavin. If we make the effort to identify Williams’s characters, we begin to wonder about who was included and who omitted. Is this a personal pantheon? Was inclusion determined by chronology. We can only guess.  Recent drawings, notable for both tonal subtlety and enlivening contrast, commemorate Jasper Johns’s, Robert Rauschenberg’s, and Cy Twombly’s visit to Robert Motherwell’s 1952 exhibition at Kootz Gallery or present an agile Louise Bourgeois at home.

Kenneth Noland, a painter notably absent from Williams’s overview of the recent New York art world, said that “When you look at a great painting, it’s like a conversation. It has questions for you. It raises questions in you.” Williams’s recent work certainly raises provocative questions. If we are attentive enough, it might even provide some answers.

Karen Wilkin
New York, October 2024

Karen Wilkin is an art critic, independent curator of modern and contemporary art, writer, teacher and art historian.
A close associate of Clement Greenberg from the 1970s until his death, she organized numerous museum exhibitions, often solo shows on artists such as Stuart Davis, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Helen Frankenthaler and Hans Hofmann. She has also curated numerous group shows exploring the nature of painting today, such as those in which she presented the work of Alun Williams in New York: The Body in Question at The Painting Center, (2021) and What only Paint can do at Triangle Gallery (2012).
Karen Wilkin is the author of several important monographs on the artists named above, as well as on others such as Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, Giorgio Morandi and Kenneth Noland…
She writes regularly for : Art in America, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review et The Hopkins Review. She teaches at the New York Studio School.

Titled Claude Cahun / Marcel Moore, this show aims to shed light on the exceptional research of Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob) who, along with her life partner and half-sister Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe), anticipated discussions on subjects of extreme relevance to contemporary society, such as gender and identity.

masha silchenko
(1993, Odessa, Ukraine)
Masha Silchenko studied at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2021.
She previously attended the Odessa Art College (Ukraine) and Geidai, Tokyo University of the Arts, where she was introduced to traditional ceramic techniques. Her work crosses and contrasts drawing, sculpture and painting on canvas. Myths, beliefs, dreams and nightmares are tamed through a sensitive, narrative interpretation.
Masha Silchenko is currently in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and has taken part in residencies at the Takifuji Foundation in Japan, Komplot in Brussels, ASA Studios and Achterhaus in Hamburg. She has exhibited at DOC, Betonsalon, CAC Bretigny, Exo-Exo, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Château de Vincennes in Paris; Rodeo in London; Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof in Hamburg, Germany, Casa Filipka in Mexico, Import Export in Warsaw, Poland; Artorama art fairs

simon martin
(1991, Vitry-sur-Seine, France)
Simon Martin’s pictorial work is built on the recovery and resurgence of details, evoking the contemporary world and intimacy. « Simon Martin lays on the canvas, the substance of what he loves. People, flowers, the rest, share the same languidness, recorded on surfaces with chalky ranges, with a thoroughly mineral sensuality. Through painting, he transforms the moment into imagery, using a fiercely photographic strategy, to do with writing through light.» (Joël Riff) He obtained his master’s degree from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2017 and studied at the Royal School of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 2016. He is the winner of the Bertrand de Demandolx-Dedons 2017 Portrait Prize awarded from les Amis des Beaux-Arts. In 2019, he took part in Révélations Emerige and the Antoine Marin Prize.
His work was featured in solo exhibitions at the galerie Jousse Entreprise in March 2023, in 2020 and on the occasion of FIAC 2021 at Grand Palais Éphémère and in 2023 at the Peter Kilchmann Gallery in Zurich. He also took part in group  exhibitions at MO.CO in Montpellier, at Musée des Sables d’Olonnes, musée Estrine of Saint-Rémy de Provence, musée des Beaux-Arts de Dôle, MUCEM in Marseille, and at Fondation Pernod-Ricard in Paris. In 2021, one of this painting joined thecollection of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

xolo cuintle
(San Francisco, USA, 1995 ; Paris, France, 1996)
Xolo Cuintle is an artist duo formed in 2020 by Romy Texier and Valentin Vie Binet, who live in Paris and work in Aubervilliers.
After graduating from the Ecole Duperré, the duo participated in a residency at the Manufacture des Gobelins (2019-2020, Paris) with the French Mobilier National. Xolo Cuintle produces works that challenge the boundaries between sculpture, furniture and décor. The duo create sculptures in concrete, transforming this solid, inert material into fertile ground for organically inspired ornamentation. Xolo Cuintle builds spaces on the edge of dream and simulacrum. They presented solo exhibitions at Saint-Anne Gallery (Paris) in 2021, at Galerie Chloé Salagado (Paris) in 2022, and at the ARTORAMA fair in Marseille with DS galerie (Paris) in 2023. In 2024, they participate in group shows at the Collection Lambert in Avignon, at the CAC Bretigny (Hors-les murs), or previously at the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2023, and in several international fairs such as Alcova (Milan), Art Genève (Geneva), Artissima (Turin). In 2023, their work joined the CNAP collection, and in 2021 the Kadist collection.