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.

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.

On entering we are welcomed by her Morceau choisi group, wall works of meticulously handled white plaster in which, little by little, we discern a navel, set in a circle and conjuring up, of course, the myth of the omphalos. According to the Greeks of old Zeus released two eagles at the eastern and western boundaries of the world, then caused the omphalos, a rounded stone, to fall at the point where they met in flight, thus marking the centre – the   »navel » – of the world. Set almost at the centre of the human body, the navel is thus endowed with a powerful significance. Morceau choisi remains marked by an anonymity far from easy to penetrate: its very presentation shrouds it in mystery, in a strange ambience reminiscent of works like the artist’s Ligne muette (porcelain, 2010). In their method these pieces involve the precise duplication of the initial subject. In its treatment this group is first and foremost a form of drawing.

Frédérique Lucien’s concern with ambiguity is even more pronounced in Nombril (Navel), the ensemble of charcoal drawings spread over the gallery’s longest wall. The salient whiteness of the wall and the sheets of paper gradually yields up the drawings. In working her way through this part of the body, the artist offers a list of infinite variations in which the relationship with human scale is an ongoing presence. She has opted for a sheet of paper close in size to the pelvis of an average person, but while the approach might be seen as resembling that of a scientist, « this exact notation of the real morphs into a abstract version of line. »[1] And so, in the works making up Nombril, Lucien seems to have forgotten the initial subject in order to concentrate on line and stroke. Her fondness for the body reappears notably in the series Anonyme (2010-2012), even if this time the result leads us elsewhere by establishing a link with her preferred themes: the vegetal and mineral world, landscape and speculation about drawing. And out of these drawings of navels spring real Chinese landscapes, Japanese-inflected mountains, fish and, sometimes, a scattering of pebbles.

Advancing through an atmosphere of near-pristine whiteness, we find ourselves beneath the skylight, surrounded by large-format drawings using coloured cut-outs and titled Feuiller. Here line, contour and curve are handled differently. The oppositions between solid and void, between opacity and transparency, are an extension of the earlier approaches, with the coloured cut-outs of these vegetal shapes following a regular, repetitive, geometrical system that varies from one drawing to another: an alignment of circles with a dot in the centre, maybe, or a grid made up of diamond shapes. These cut-outs stand out all the more clearly in that they suggest a different movement: the regular rhythm of the ground contrasts with a random undulation, geometrical precision with an elusive shimmering, the illusory discreetness of the gridding with an assertively coloured surface.

This exhibition offers recent pieces by Frédérique Lucien as a logical extension of what has gone before: works which, shot through with ambiguity, might generate a degree of uncertainty, in fact reveal – but only gradually – their multiple meanings, and so transcend the initial subject. That the artist’s conjecturing about drawing assumes these different forms attests to an unceasing observation of the real world.

The catalogue for this exhibition includes a text by Pierre Giquel. It is published by Editions Lienart and Galerie Jean Fournier.