Immortelle

Immortelle offers an ambitious panorama of young French figurative painting. Deployed for the first time in all art centers, the exhibition is organized in two parts.

At the Mo.Co., emblematic artists of the French scene, born from 1970 to the beginning of the 80s, are presented. The generous, sensitive exhibition intends to pay homage to painting, in its physical, material, erotic and romantic aspects.

At Mo.Co. Panacée, the new generation of the mid-80s and 90s offers a plural vision of the future of figurative painting through a revisitation of the great traditional genres mixed with the contribution of contemporaneity and conceptual issues.

What are the three key dates that have marked your career?
 
1992: As a teenager, while visiting the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, I was walking around the different rooms when I discovered a self-portrait by Claude Cahun hanging under a frame, alone beside a large window, almost against the light. Faced with this androgynous and disguised face, I saw the possibility of linking a queer identity to an artistic practice, of making them live together, intrinsically.  

2018: My exhibition Portraits, at Shaynaynay: a return to the human figure after some more conceptual exhibitions. Shaynaynay was a non-commercial art space located in the La Banane district of Paris. I felt comfortable in such project-spaces (Treize, Bonny Poon, Sans Titre), a circuit that made it possible for my work to exist for several years, and which allowed me to find my voice without being parasitised by commercial issues.  

2021: Belle Main, at the Fitzpatrick Gallery (Paris), is my most substantial exhibition to date, through which I have been able to explore a wide variety of subjects (still lifes, nudes and portraits of artist friends, scenes inspired by my daytime or nighttime wanderings) seeking to establish a silent dialogue between them so that they compose a blurred, mobile community that blends contemporary queer intimacy with references to the history of painting. 

How did painting become your preferred medium?
 
By instinct, as a teenager, both by practising, developing my techniques, and by observing the paintings of others, whether they be the great masters or the figurative revival.  
Even if my painting gives off a certain softness or tenderness, I think, painting is for me a form of outlet. Figuration has a very intimate relationship with death, it is a permanent dialogue between the being and the image, presence and oblivion. To borrow a phrase from Paul Gadenne on writing, I would say that I paint ‘to devour what devours me.’ 
 
Is painting immortal?
 
I believe that looking at the world through painting means looking at it with the awareness of a history of representation. It is a didactic movement, which questions the gesture, the image, and its referent. I think that a medium does not wear out as long as new gazes emerge.