Since the 1990s Lucien’s work has been based on a vocabulary of forms and motifs rooted in the vegetal, the mineral, the organic and the human body, in series that address her themes in several media simultaneously: the body in drawing, sculpture and ceramics, and the vegetal mainly in drawing and paper cutouts. Each of these series reciprocally enriches the others.

Lucien has been working on the Feuiller series since 2012. Invited to take part in the multi-museum Dessiner-Tracer project of autumn 2011–autumn 2012, she visited the Musée Matisse at Le Cateau-Cambrésis and the La Piscine museum in Roubaix. Her initial response took the form of notebook drawings and cutouts, some of which appeared in the journal Cursif, which accompanied the project. This series was inspired not only by Matisse’s drawings and cutouts, but also by old fabrics the artist found in the Roubaix museum’s textile department. The outcome is fruitful interplay between two notions of the decorative: we find Matisse’s freedom in Lucien’s vegetal and linear forms, as well as a particular attentiveness on her part to what the applied arts can offer.

The French title carries overtones of « leaf » in the sense both of paper and plant. The Feuiller are a core part of an approach which unifies drawing and motif and uses observation of the vegetal as the premise for a move towards abstraction. The repertoire comprises cutout shapes in the form of individual or juxtaposed silhouettes and outlines: abstract variations on vegetal or organic originals which are then overlaid on grids; these latter can be regular, repetitive, geometrical or random.

While Lucien’s vocabulary remains immediately recognisable, these new works represent a radical shift in her relationship with colour over the last six years: a daring evolution towards a wedding of muted and bolder hues and increasingly intense contrasts. The grids are rendered more complex by a proliferation of lines and motifs reminiscent of the Art & Craft movement. Here we detect something more gestural – expressionistic, even – that is totally new in this artist’s oeuvre.

For this exhibition she has come up with a distinctive presentation on the wide wall below the skylight: a mingling of different formats like that in Matisse’s studio, where the cutout compositions created an endlessly renewed environment. This underscores the notion of series and the passage from one work to the next, while also using the scale of the venue to situate Lucien’s work spatially.

The exhibition is accompanied by an artist’s book in an edition of 300, 30 of which include an original work.

Stéphane Bordarier – Pierre Buraglio – Jean Degottex – Simon Hantaï – Sam Francis – Shirley Jaffe – Frédérique Lucien – Marcelle Loubchansky – Joan Mitchell – Bernard Piffaretti – Jean-Paul Riopelle – Josef Sima – Kimber Smith – Claude Viallat

« Big and Small Paintings in Memory of Jean Fournier » is a tribute to the gallery’s founder and the choices he made between his initial venture on Avenue Kléber in 1954 and his death in 2006. The exhibition has been designed as a dialogue between the different generations of artists who crossed paths at the gallery, from Josef Sima to Bernard Piffaretti and from Simon Hantaï to Frédérique Lucien.

            These are pictures that Jean Fournier actually saw and admired. Some of them were given to him as gifts, while others were shown in exhibitions at the gallery in its different locations: Avenue Kléber, Rue du Bac and Rue Quincampoix.

Common to these artists is a particular concern with colour and space, but above all they shared a passionate, responsive way of being in the world. To present them together like this is also to chronicle the history of the gallery in all its change and constancy. In the course of time Galerie Jean Fournier became a touchstone, a place where painting and abstraction were uncompromisingly defended – and still are today. The exhibition unspools the thread of Fournier’s emblematic encounters with artists who went on to become major 20th-century figures, among them Simon Hantaï and Joan Mitchell; and points up the links with such American artists as Sam Francis and Shirley Jaffe, and with the painterly avant-gardes of the 1960s–1970s as personified by Claude Viallat and Pierre Buraglio.

            Fournier’s receptiveness towards the following generations – Stéphane Bordarier, Frédérique Lucien, Bernard Piffaretti – opened up new programming avenues and helped forge the gallery’s identity as we now know it. Since his passing in 2006 the gallery has continued to champion new artists working in abstraction or kindred veins. It still flies the flag of the variety he was so attached to: Fournier was a passionate ambassador both for the art of the past and that of his own time, a gifted go-between whose measured but implacable eye left its mark on generations of artists, curators and collectors.

            The handsomest gesture of esteem we can offer Jean Fournier is to hold firmly and sincerely to his course of action, for the sake both of the artists and those who support them.

« Fundamentally the truest fidelity one can show towards Fournier and what he built is expressed in his own definition: expect nothing, hope for everything. This meant dropping the ethos of resemblance in favour of serendipity . . . That, finally, is the Fournier line: successive generations endlessly casting new light on each other, and all within the same household. »

The exhibition will be accompanied by a generously illustrated booklet including archival material and a text by Pierre Wat in French and English

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. »