Converging geometries - Extension

In this series of three exhibitions we invite you to discover, or rediscover, the gallery’s contemporary artists. They present the work of sixteen of the artists we represent, who honor us with their friendship and their loyalty, the majority for more than thirty years. With conviction and talent, these artists defend a movement that has become the DNA of the gallery: "geometric abstraction." These exhibitions highlight the richness of geometric abstraction—its coherence, its diversity, and its pertinence. With these three group shows, we thought it would be interesting to offer an overview of the artists’ work from different periods and to observe the ways in which the trajectories and the viewpoints of these artists converge and interact with one another. There are fortuitous mysteries and alchemies to be found in abstraction, geometry, and color. Our artists give us some pointers in this direction and open up other avenues, to our great delight.

The first show brings together six artists. Ode Bertrand, who works principally with black and white, claims that she dislikes color, and yet when she employs it to interpret her tightly formed grids, colors begin to vibrate and dance. Line, stroke, and rhythm are the threads that underpin her investigations.

In the work of Jean-François Dubreuil, newspapers provide the structure. The artist chooses randomly from his palette of colors according to the mood of the moment—while some colors are assigned specific roles, they are all the fruit of a process governed by pleasure.

Claude Pasquer approaches color beneath a uniform layer of black, white, or a color. He speaks of vertical subdivisions that give rhythm to the pictorial space through colored vertical and horizontal sequences, with the result that colors only reveal themselves in narrow bands that bring other tonalities to the monochrome unity of the outer layer.

Renaud Jacquier Stajnowicz projects his work into space; it is as though the shapes of his picture frames call out to us. He arranges his monochrome hues and hide glue like so many signs of freedom, a shape exploding in a color that brings a sense of calm.

Denis Pondruel speaks to us of his dreams. His concrete structures appear as vanities that distill his hidden poetry, glimpsed in the darkness of a room or at the foot of a staircase, a few luminous words that arise to deliver a verse, a song, or a dance.

While Bauduin paces through time, with Les Demeures (Dwellings) a part of his exploration of memory, he also embraces the concept of wabi, a Japanese term meaning an effaced form of beauty, a quality of refinement masked by rusticity. Les Demeures are a tangible example of this, where the subject is evoked in its simplest, indeed most archaic, form, by a block of granite with a double-sloping peak that enters into a dialogue with a relief outline of its shape on the wall.

A constructed geometry, often marked by vibrant colors as seen in the work of Auguste Herbin—this DNA has run through and characterized our exhibitions and our stands at art fairs from our earliest days. Our contemporary artists, to whom we express our gratitude for their unwavering support, are living proof of this.