Gaël Darras, Ilhem Ellouze, Bastien Faudon, Aurélien Finance, Juliette Jouannais, Arthur Lambert, Isabelle Vorle
For the first exhibition of the year 2024, Robet Dantec Gallery has invited seven artists to answer the question of abstraction in art. How can we speak about abstract art while this movement sends us to the XXe century ? However, for the young generation of artists, abstract art seems to be back again, like the figurative painting which has known since a couple of years a reappropriation of the classical art master’s codes. This exhibition presented by the Robet Dantec Gallery is presenting artist’s works essentially on paper, due of the desire to grasp the abstraction of the XX century by reinvented it. Some works come from concret art, some others are typically lyrics. The colors, the tempera, the acrylic, the textile impression, the volume. Even sometimes can appear a form we think to identify, a paréidolia…
Gaël Darras
Lives and works in Escamps
By taking the brick pattern, a tirelessly repeated unit, Gaël Darras is building architecture spaces with a minimalist style, by using watercolor. His buildings, disinvested of every function, are destitute of any precise spatial or temporal context – as they bring us to an old antiquity, they can also remind us of our contemporary masonries. They are floating in the white matrix of paper whose sides are virgins, like virtual volumes, or mirages. These constructions are not livable or penetrable. They show as much as they hide, they push our look to search out beyond what we see. Their frontiers bring us back to our intimity, like “interior temples” whose entrance door is kept secret.
Ilhem Ellouze
Lives and works in Ronchamp
The Ilhem Ellouze’s starting point of her process is the artistic traditions of her own muslim and arabic culture, within the spirit of occidental contemporary art. The repetition and the accumulation of her “modules” do not fill an aesthetic function but are looking for the efficiency of the concept : the representation of the individual inside the human crowd. Pictorial or sculptural, her work represents itself as an accumulation of signs which are saturating the space. The repeating modules are archetypes themselves : they symbolize the human form by simplifying and schematizing it.
Bastien Faudon
Lives and works in Avignon
Bastien Faudon is entertaining a singular and diverse relation with drawing, that he uses as a medium of predilection. Draws of scientific researchers, preparatory draws, maps made for travels or explorations are all into questioning devices about the nature of the documents and the statute of the drawing in the exhibition’s space. […]. He is inspired by animal documentaries and enjoys diverting them. By doing that, he proposes a coexistence between science and art to question the relation that we entertain with the environment, switching between the infinitely big and the infinitely small. He is also questioning the human place and its representation.
Aurélien Finance
Lives and works in Mulhouse
Dramatized, the work of Aurélien Finance is built on absurd et make up stories, inspired by reality, myths or tales. Whether they are performances within he is playing himself or creations with color forms, his artwork is diverting the textile world with a deconstruction of traditional codes. He is practicing ancestral expertises to experiment the borders in a ludic approach with a lot of humor and poetry. He is into embroidery, hook and knitting mostly for their performative aspect, repetitive and cathartic. Those creations become transitional objects and make alive imaginary people, organic identities, rescaped growths of a forgotten memory… His dyslexia is assumed in his work like an asset. It opens the thought with images who find their meaning in their own globality.
Juliette Jouannais
Lives and works in Paris
Juliette Jouannais is sculpting color. It is how the journalist and art critic Harry Bellet titled his article published in Le Monde in 2020, for the personal exhibition of the artist at the Fernet Branca Fondation (Saint-Louis). Indeed, the delicately lace cutted papers, pinned in scroll on the wall or on the back of the frame are forgotten by the contagious color which takes all the white surfaces. The establishment is a very delicate operation, so delicate that the artist does not let someone else do it. “Going from the plan to the volume, her landforms are are meandering in a slender movement where the trait is fusioning to the form and to the plan, to bring forth the emotion of the world, that would be the light of the vision” (Philippe Cyroulnik, art critic).
Arthur Lambert
Lives and works in Landerneau
Arthur Lambert is putting under the spotlight the transformed states of nature and human beings. In an incessant quest that convocs each time the thought and the material, he invites us to a fantastic trip in his coded and secret language. As a painter who collaborated with the Scottish artist Richard Wright (Turner Prise 2009), he is progressively reporting his attention on watercolor and disappearance/dissolution of the human figure. From painting, he kept the taste of color, the vibration of lines and forms, while intervening more and more on the abstract and optical dimension of his artworks. The use of paper allows him to affirm the materiality of drawing by permute, sometimes, the different techniques and mediums : gouache, golden leaf, painting on photography and japanese paper.
Isabelle Vorle
Lives and works in Paris
In her watercolor and ink’s drawings, Isabelle Vorle is experimenting as a laboratory researcher. She applies the puddle on her paper, adds some color, precisely dosed. It happens to her sometimes to manipulate and raise the paper to bring to the liquid draw a form. This process is closer to haptic research than visual research. Her Agates serie has been mostly accomplished on “stone paper”, a paper without vegetal fibers, only composed with mineral powder. Extremely smooth, it allows the paper to slide. One dried, it evokes a veil of color crossed by the light. Isabelle Vorle also makes experimental movies. Her last film, “Stone Eve” (2020) was primed in many international festivals.
