The insatiable intellectual curiosity pushes Bernard Moninot to be interested in multiple physical phenomena. From these scientific singularities, the artist extracts all the subtle poetry.    He creates abstract works often based on a fictitious function which would have no other use than to reveal an invisible beauty: a dew catcher, the traces of an anemograph, a bird’s flight or the movement of the stars.

The exhibition takes its name from the space installation Ensecrètement (2018-2019). It is a spectacular narrative device consisting of four steel and artificial silk frames forming a transparent chamber in which a set of suspended elements are illuminated and activated by a mechanism. At the heart of the chamber is a phrase borrowed from the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, « The strange memory of that which has never been deposited in a memory ». The sentence turns on itself like a prayer wheel and the light projects multiple reflections on the silk room and beyond.

This work is a sequel to the installation Chambre d’écho (2012-2017) exhibited at the Jean Fournier gallery during the eponymous exhibition in 2018.   This new work uses a process of synesthetic creation – a neurological phenomenon in which several senses are associated – often evoked by Bernard Moninot, produced by the reminiscence of visionary moments generated by the sound frequencies of the A of a tuning fork resonating in contact with objects.

Ensecrètement is undoubtedly the most autobiographical work produced by the artist.

The second major work in the exhibition is the sculpture DewPoint (2019), designed to be a fictional device for collecting dewdrops.

« In creation, the birth of an idea is comparable to the natural process, where certain atmospheric conditions are necessary for the formation of the dew phenomenon.  The organic forms of Dewdrop can be found in the series of drawings Dewdrop Edge, made up of Indian ink washes, mica collage and gold threads; and in the series Avalanche Foreboding (2019), a work composed of two planes: an artificial silk canvas through which one can see transparent sections of mountains or glaciers painted in acrylic.
The exhibition also unveils three other recent series of drawings, a series of paintings and a series of editions that testify to Bernard Moninot’s extreme intellectual agility and constant curiosity.

Sketches, note-taking, plastic research or simple daydreams, these series are both the source and the traces of his creation.

Will be exhibited in particular Mémoire du vent TOME 2 (published in 1999-2019) thirty drawings recording the effects of air movement; Pierres retournés (2019) which is inspired by the hidden part of the stones that is never in contact with air or light, or Migrateur partiel (2019), a celestial cartography drawn with a bird’s feather, inspired by the seasonal migration of birds that orient their movements with the position of the stars.

Mitchell and Riopelle were mutually driven not only by their passionate love for each other, but also by their intellectual and artistic intimacy. From their meeting in Paris in 1955until their separation in 1979, their works – rightdown to the titles – testify to the different holiday spots and painting places they shared; in short, to a life ogetherfor which Jean Fournier was privileged travelling companion. Calm and equable by nature, this charismatic figure frequented all sorts of strong-minded artists, to the point of describing himself as a « lay brother ».

So now it seems perfectly natural tha the pair should be united for the first time at the Rue du Bac gallery: a return to the roots. The works chosen match the scale of the venue, forming a kind of intimate, deeply felt trajectory expressive of Fournier’s choices and what still underpines the gallery’s identity today.

In 2017 the gallery was home to an exhibition of Simon Hantai’s work from the 1940s and 1950s. In it, between the lines, could be described a portrait of Jean Fournier as a bold, intuitive figure. When Joan Mitchell and Jean-Paul Riopelle Meet Jean Fournier points up another side of his personality: more intense, more inclined to acute sensitivity and a love of colour.

The exhibition is curated by Michel Martin, curator of the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec in 1975-2008, and organiser of the exhibition Mitchell/Riopelle. Un couple dans la démesure recently presented at the Fonds Edouard et Hélène Leclerc pour la Culture in Landerneau, France.

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/demozay-jean-fournier/ http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/demozay-jean-fournier/#comments Thu, 16 Jan 2014 13:28:50 +0000 Galleries http://www.galleriesinparis.com/?p=2756 Galerie Jean Fournier is delighted to present Didier Demozay’s recent paintings. For this new exhibition Demozay, a regular exhibitor at the gallery since 1986, is showing a collection of paintings in various formats as well as some works on paper.

Since the 1980s, Didier Demozay has based his painting on a profound relationship between the act of painting and the colour itself. The coloured areas are spread liberally, and combine with the white spaces in the picture in such a way that they sometimes seem to float there. His deceptively simple work is strikingly radical and minimalist. The shapes tend towards the rectangular but are not geometrical. They wrestle but never make contact; they attract or repel one another right up to the edges of the painting. The white of the canvas is alive and makes play with the gaps and tensions produced between the shapes and the colours and how they relate to the space.

Didier Demozay works with great economy of means to an established routine. The background of the canvas is covered with a thin layer of white, on which he paints two or three coloured areas. The choice of the first colour is decisive. Demozay does not think of himself as a colourist but wants only to paint the colour itself. He rejects effect for effect’s sake and uses only pure colours, often the same ones: deep black, ultramarine, violets, acid or dark greens, reds and oranges. He very seldom mixes them and then only to obtain a particular colour like pink. He does however sometimes superimpose them.

The canvas is an experimental field for Didier Demozay rather than a representational area, where colour is all-important. His paintings are generally large scale and usually rectangular, like the shapes painted on them. He paints standing up in front of the canvas – a kind of trial of strength with the work in hand. He is an exacting artist, destroying anything that doesn’t come up to his expectations and only rarely reworks one of the rejects. He pushes painting as far as it will go; each new work is a new test for him.

Demozay never considers a canvas to be finished. What the visitor sees is a painting in progress’. « Whenever we went to Demozay’s studio, we could never dissociate the painting we were standing in front of from the man who was working at it. What we were being shown was a block of present time in which we were unable to separate the painting from the act that situated it in that instant ».[1]

2012 marked a turning point in the Soriano oeuvre. Abandoning the steel cable, aluminium tubing and spraypak lines and symbols of the previous few years, he began working in a more pared-down but more complex vein. ‘The work has been reduced to its essence,’ he says. ‘The three-dimensional elements have been flattened and merged with the paint on the wall. The work is more complex because once cut back, with the wires and cables gone, it can be more difficult to grasp. The relation between the work and the space it occupies becomes less tangible, more theoretical.’[1]

Made specifically for the exhibition, the large wall painting shows us what the artist sees from his studio in Maine, overlooking four steep rock faces that recur in the composition as irregular quadrilaterals. The artist considers his wall paintings as landscapes, whence the exhibition’s title: Panorama.

The sprayed parts are looser and contrast with the linear contours of the quadrilaterals and rectangles. The narrow, sharply defined lines suggest three-dimensional spaces, while the arrows guide the viewer’s eye.

Soriano lists the instructions for creating the work in a separate document providing ‘guided spontaneity’. He sometimes compares his works to musical scores, with some of the details left to the discretion and imagination of the person reproducing the work.

As it follows the visual itinerary, the eye gradually discovers the ‘panorama’ which, unfolding like a sentence along the gallery wall, leads us to the space beneath the skylight. In the works on paper, independent echoes of the wall painting, we again find the lines, arrows, circles, annotations and shadow areas, but in conjunction with more figurative elements. On overlaid, irregularly folded sheets of Japan paper Soriano renders what he sees and the movement that results when he lets his gaze wander through the space he is transcribing – often that of his home or studio. He calls these works ‘site’ drawings.

Deployment of a variety of media – spray paint, graphite, watercolour – gives the works on paper a more diverse chromatic range. The graphic marks, the lines, the letters reminding us of the exhibition title and the traces left by the folding process combine to convey the movements of the artist’s eye.

Panorama, then, is a group of works in which the eye is the driving force, from the artist’s creative gaze through to the viewer’s own movements.

A brochure designed by the artist will accompany the exhibition.

 For further information, contact Justine Zelmar – justine@galerie-jeanfournier.com