If the House of DUVELLEROY survived After War although the habit of wearing fans declined in the West, it is thanks to the passion of its inheritor, who conserved pleating moulds, vintage fans, sketches for sticks, guards and leafs with the conviction to “make something out of it one day”.

Waiting to see the sleeping beauty wake anew, he contributed to the realization of several exhibits, among which one at the Paris Galliera Fashion Museum in 1985, and participated to numerous publications on DUVELLEROY.

One is passionate of brand heritage, the other has worn fans since childhood.

When Eloïse and Raphaëlle met, together they forged a dream : to resuscitate couture fans, by redeveloping one of the most important Parisian fan house. They became partners with the inheritor of the DUVELLEROY house, to give a second life to the brand by launching contemporary creations.

In parallel with its collections, DUVELLEROY has perpetuated the tradition of collaborating with some famous couture houses.

Paintings 2013 – 2016

Galerie Jean Fournier is pleased to be presenting a new solo exhibition by Jean François Maurige, devoted exclusively to paintings.

Since the 1980s Jean François Maurige has been making pictures according to an established but evolving set of rules. At the Marché Saint-Pierre textile market in Paris he buys offcuts of red fabric not actually intended for paintings, rather than the traditional linen canvas. He staples his fabric to the wall, then primes it by brushing it down vertically with very dilute white acrylic. The prepared canvas is laid on the floor. The canvas is then stretched and paint is applied in tones varying from orange-red to violet, from which emerge shapes – « figures », the artist calls them – to be worked on. Omnipresent as colour and substance, red is one of the essential components of Maurige’s work, and is sometimes conceptualised as a non-colour. The artist’s attachment to red in his paintings hinges on its combination of graphic and chromatic effectiveness.

Maurige feels he had no choice about this colour. For him red is not simply a surface: it has its own material character, its own depth. In the course of time it has become the actual subject of his pictures. By appropriating it in this way he hopes to free it of such obvious connotations as blood, life and death.

The exhibition comprises a group of pictures painted between 2013 and 2016. In the more recent works we detect a change of approach: the red shapes seem lighter, forming spirals that energise the picture as they hover against the ground of the canvas. While more assertive, this ground is less colour-saturated. Form and gesture are liberated. We also find these arabesques as a repetitive motif filling the artist’s sketchbooks.

Another group of pictures is composed of canvases bearing slanting lines. Already present in his pictures from the 2000s, these lines have changed colour: no longer red – or black, as in the paintings on paper – they range from blue to violet.

The spirited presentation alternates large and small works hung at different heights – a reprise of the method Maurige has been experimenting with in his studio. New to Galerie Fournier, this mode of exhibition was tried out by the artist at the 2015 edition of L’art dans les Chapelles (Art in Chapels) in Brittany.

]]> http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/jean-francois-maurige-fournier/feed/ 0 http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/matisse-fournier/ http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/matisse-fournier/#comments Sat, 27 Feb 2016 10:12:58 +0000 Galleries http://www.galleriesinparis.com/?p=3467  

Matisse Now

Stéphane Bordarier, Pierre Buraglio, Frédérique Lucien,

Pierre Mabille and Henri Matisse

 Galerie Jean Fournier is delighted to be presenting the exhibition Matisse Now, which brings together works on paper by Stéphane Bordarier, Pierre Buraglio, Frédérique Lucien and Pierre Mabille around a core offering of five original drawings by Henri Matisse. Revealing the kinship, acknowledged or indirect, between these artists and the Matisse oeuvre, the exhibition has been designed in resonance with the 10th Drawing Now salon. Exclusively devoted to contemporary drawing, the salon is held in Paris every spring. ([1])

Matisse Now comprises emblematic and in some cases hitherto unshown works by four artists individually tackling the « eternal conflict between drawing and colour ». Drawing is the underpinning of the Matisse oeuvre: he endlessly noted down what was around him – women, plants, interiors – and even drew into colour when he came up with the brilliant innovation of his cutouts. The five drawings chosen here testify to his sheer technical range and capacity for self-renewal: Indian ink, pencils, direct and more complex use of line, spatial saturation, light emanating from the white of the paper, and simplification sometimes bordering on the abstract.

Despite their radical differences, the exhibition’s four contemporary contributors find a natural unity in their assimilation of the Matisse canon. His influence, however, is integrated more as a state of mind – as a sensory relationship with the world.

From the early Masquages (Maskings) and Fenêtres (Windows) of the 1970s up to the present, Pierre Buraglio has maintained his own kind of link, at once ironic and respectful, with Matisse. The Dessins d’après (Drawings After) series is shot through with this inclusive, playful spirit. Buraglio is Matissian in his attachment to reality: that of his surroundings and his materials.

Frédérique Lucien’s suite IL (HE) betrays a similar relation to its models, while the series Feuiller (Breaking into Leaf) also addresses the notion of the decorative, combining grids and abstract motifs with solid-colour cutouts evocative of vegetal forms.

Paper can lend itself to colouring, slicing and tearing. The exhibition has provided Pierre Mabille with a pretext for new series of cutouts; while still recognisable, his characteristic shape is adroitly sabotaged by a system of coloured contrasts and counterforms. Stéphane Bordarier’s torn paper series interrogates the radical character of Matisse’s direct cutting into colour. In his paintings form hinges on a technical constraint, the drying time of glue mixed into pigment; here Bordarier contains form via the act of tearing.

Made up of « sidesteps » that include cutting-up, coloured material, models, the vegetal, line, and the work in progress, the exhibition raises the issue of contemporary reminiscences of the Matisse oeuvre. Through his inventiveness and observation of his daily life and immediate environment, Matisse achieved an unsurpassable universalism endlessly reconsidered by the artists of today.

Works on paper, 1957 – 1975

21 January – 5 March 2016

Galerie Jean Fournier is delighted to be presenting its first solo exhibition of the work of Kimber Smith: twenty drawings chosen in collaboration with American artist Joe Fyfe.

An « artist’s artist », Kimber Smith was one of those fringe figures much appreciated by Jean Fournier, art dealer in Paris from 1956 to 2006. Along with Shirley Jaffe and Sam Francis, he was among the American artists living in Paris in the 1950s. Galerie Fournier went on to become a legendary venue for American painters in France and this year, a decade after its founder’s death, it is presenting this first one man show; there were none at the gallery during the artist’s lifetime. The two men met in 1958, when Fournier was director of the Galerie Kléber, and he would include Smith’s work in group exhibitions up until the 1990s.

The exhibition comprises twenty works on paper from between 1957–1975 and covers the different periods and stages of Smith’s drawing and painting. There emanates from these works a formal and gestural freedom accompanied by rapidity of composition and execution. Smith deploys a concentrated vocabulary of basic shapes like diamonds, circles, zigzags and rectangles, arranging them on the paper in deceptively simple ways. The same is true of his use of colour: the palette is limited and the paint comes straight from the tube. Here gesture is quick, effective and sometimes reinforced by such « ordinary » media as the marker and the spraypak.

A distinctive feature of the Smith oeuvre is an especially close attention to composition, achieved by a blend of different styles and treatments. The « KS » signature is an important element here: written in pencil, it is often inordinately large and sometimes set in the middle of the work. Direct and highly expressive, it gives the impression of being an essential but at the same time ambiguous part of the composition: is it a functional signature? Or a formal sign?

Smith’s oeuvre is all about fragility and balance. As much influenced by Tintoretto, Fra Angelico and Cimabue as by aspects of his everyday life – one of his sons playing the piano, a cathedral visited during a summer in Brittany – these pictures speak of a dialogue between reality and the imaginary, between memories and interpretations.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue containing essays by Joe Fyfe and Eric Suchère, together with a detailed biography.

For this, Christophe Robe’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Jean Fournier, we are delighted to be showing a group of paintings and drawings representing the artist’s most recent work.

Robe’s investigations take place on the border between figuration and abstraction. What immediately strikes the viewer is the strangeness of a dreamlike world in which recurring figurative elements – most often vegetal or organic – are juxtaposed with more abstract ones. This intermingling is reflected in recourse to different techniques, as Robe rubs back, washes down and accumulates layer upon painterly layer.

This « gourmet » accumulation of media and methods summons the viewer’s imagination to the outer reaches of fiction or fables for children. Landscape, undergrowth, sea floor: each picture is a world in itself, marked by an ambiguity between depth and surface, between painting’s physical and optical dimensions. Intertwined branches mesh with sharply defined geometrical shapes, or with more uncertain forms and textural excrescences open to multiple interpretations. When something seems immediately recognisable, Robe responds by confusing the issue. Successive layers of paint enhance the images’ depth, in a use of stratification that embodies the surfacing of the artist’s perceptual memory.

« From stratum to stratum, porosity, capillarity and transfer lead the eye down into haptic depths to which only the vocabulary of gastronomy seems equal: slivers of crystallised light, toppings of bitter-sweet nuances, rolls of candied colours, paint beaten until stiff, creamy tones, chromatic caramels. A groundbreaking inventory of interplay between painting and savouring that propels the viewer-taster behind the screen of the visible and into the deliciously troubled waters of painterly blindness. »

The same teeming abundance is to be found in the artist’s drawings, rich formal explorations that are totally independent of his painting yet linked to it in a host of different ways. This is why the exhibition mingles them cinematically with paintings large and small: close-ups coexisting with long takes.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue prefaced by Stéphanie Katz

(Published by Galerie Jean Fournier).

A Look Back at the Tabulas

Galerie Jean Fournier is pleased to be presenting A Look Back at the Tabulas, an exhibition devoted to Simon Hantaï‘s Tabulas series. The exhibition takes the form of a selection of major works, two of them remarkable, large-scale pieces only ever shown at the Museum Ludwig retrospective in Budapest in 2014.

In the catalogue of the retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne In Paris in 2013, Dominique Fourcade speaks of the sensuality of the Tabulas and the way they engage our sight, our touch and even our hearing: « An unforgettable experience for anyone who has seen, at least once, the knots at the corner of each square on the back of the canvas. Once again, such alluring surface relief – sculpture, irrepressibly. And the sound it makes: for the marvel is that it’s audible, a mingling of champagne corks popping and a wave hissing on the sand; all pleasure, and excitement. »

The Tabulas are characterised by their regularly folded squares, gestural repetition and masterly use of colour. Extending over ten years, from 1972 to 1982, this series represents a major phase in the Hantaï oeuvre, when he systematized and simplified the act of painting: knotting the canvas, painting it, then unfolding it.

In his book L’étoilement (The Starring Effect) Georges Didi-Huberman, a personal and intellectual ally of Hantaï, addresses the issue of the pictorial space created by the knot and its undoing: « A knot, says Hantaï, is first of all ‘the meeting point between a vertical and a horizontal’. But the knot immediately does more than establish a junction. In one sense it invaginates space, creating pockets and folded, tactile innernesses; in another it opens space up to the starring effect, to what Hantaï calls a ‘spatialising explosion’ which is also optical. »

Through its deliberately restricted choice – ten works small and large, monochrome and polychrome – this exhibition includes the different kinds of folding used in the Tabulas, from regular grids of little squares to the double forms. Thus it covers the richness of what was for Hantaï an especially productive period.

Ranged like a frieze along the gallery wall is a series of charcoal drawings on paper, all of the same format – 75.5 x 56 cm – and placed vertically or horizontally. Looking down on us from above head height, these works show pieces of a male body. A continuation of the Anonyme (Anonymous) series begun in 2010, these drawings explore the issue of physical fragmentation. The artist has worked from photographs taken in her studio, but in contrast with the Anonyme series, here only a single model has been used.

As was the case in the earlier Anonyme pieces, identification is all but impossible. The limbs are even more separate here, in that they are isolated from each other by the edges of the paper. Skin texture and details like beauty spots and wrinkles are accentuated and shown in close-up. With these fractions of bodies taken to the verge of abstraction, the result is a total loss of bearings. Modelled by the line and texture of the charcoal, this corporeal space segues towards landscape as it sublimates the human figure.

On a low table under the skylight is a group of lifesize joined hands in plaster, dating from 2014–2015. Here the artist has also worked from mouldings of the hands of relatives praying. These pieces have deliberately been left white, as a suggestion of purity. This meticulously fashioned group reproduces its subject exactly, but transcends it in its use of white and its variations on the gesture of prayer.

A third and last group combines drawings of hands and sculptures. Some of the plaster pieces represent knees or elbows in shades of orange, ochre or brown, non-naturalistic colours that heighten their strangeness and mystery. The bends and articulations alter the meaning of the shapes: the body morphs into hills and mountains, and into uneven landscapes.

In both the works on paper and those in three dimensions we find the same scale and fragmentation ratios. Shot through with ambiguity, they reveal their multiple meanings and thus transcend their initial subject, as this pondering on drawing finds expression in other media and attests to the artist’s unremitting observation of reality.

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition contains an essay by art historian Danielle Orhan.

« Bernard Moninot’s work fits none of the major categories. While it uses pigment, it does not emerge as painting; while it occupies space, it does not invite perception as sculpture; and last of all it is not really what is understood by installation. The most accurate description would be that it is a kind of drawing – but extended drawing (in Novalis’s sense of ‘extended poetry’). »

The works making up Antichambre (Anteroom) take their inspiration from a drawing in space, a « sculpture of silence » dating from 2011. This three-dimensional grouping of circular two-way mirrors was set in motion by an electric motor and projected light and shadows on the walls. The different-sized circles provided a sonogram of the word « silence ».

The pictures making up the series are stills from an image of this work in rotation, and comprise two planes set into a frame, forming a box whose ground is painted. In the foreground tinted silk acts as a screen. The primary concern of the series is colour.

The series of drawings À la poursuite des nuages (In Pursuit of Clouds) was made in the artist’s studio in Château-Chalon. At 500 metres above sea level, the studio enjoys a panoramic view of the sky and the surrounding landscape. As if drawing a performance, or writing, the artist observes the clouds and in a left-to-right movement transposes their progress onto paper as the wind elongates them. Each fresh look corresponds to a move to the next line on the paper. The passing of time is indicated by the minutes noted at the beginning of each new line.

The last series, Terminal, was begun in 2013. Here three large works are accompanied by medium-size ones. These are pictures of airport boarding lounges – those in-between, time-killing spaces – and are a tribute to El Lissitzky, the Russian Constructivist. Made up of two layers of silk a few centimetres apart, they use linear interplay and primary colour transparency to generate a feeling of movement. Another result, as in the Antichambre series, is optical fusion of colours.

« Drawing is the characteristic aspect of my work. Since the 1980s I’ve moved away somewhat from traditional ideas of gestural marks or imprints on paper, towards hitherto untried media. This in turn has led me to explore natural phenomena, sound waves, resonances, shadows, light, etc. »