2015 April 1 - May 9

Wednesday to Saturday 2.30 - 7.30 p.m.

We never stay in the present, wrote the French philosopher Pascal in 1660 (« Les Pensées »). The pure present does not exist. Full of memories and dreams, like a hunted animal, it escapes into the depth of time. Yet this desperate flight leaves signs, traces and imprints on its passage. The artist, like a hunter from his hiding place, captures these silent signs. In its own way, he gives them life, traces them, prints engraves and carves them... By the alchemy of the work of art, the transience of time becomes matter.

Papers, blotters, paintings, collages, stampings, scratched and scraped materials, bruised and compressed metal… So many materials and techniques, weighed down by the passing instant. Thus among the three artists we are presenting, Monique Dollé-Lacour, Pierre Duclou Elizabeth Oulès, each follows the path of his own memory and imagination, each with its own duration.

Monique DOLLE-LACOUR.

Strangely, Monique Dollé-Lacour paints with « instinct and intuition ». The artist lets the gesture freely flow. However, this non-figurative painting is organized around an underlying scripture. Signs, traces, memories are distant echoes of unknown calligraphies (she lived for several years in Saudi Arabia), relics and remains, torn from the accidents of oblivion, focus the eye and we become archaeologists of our memories.

Monique Dollé-Lacour's works are pure spaces of painting. The eye focuses on the sign whose evocative power is enhanced by the chromatic sobriety of the picture. The monochromatic colour, red or blue, violent with a few nuances, rudely contrast with the black tar of the sign. And sometimes, conversely, the chromaticism becomes the sign itself on a background of metallic sparkling silver gray. The little pink blotters, a childhood memory, soaked with diffuse reminiscences…

 Pierre DUCLOU

The painting of Pierre Duclou invites us to dreamily stroll within its shimmering colours and materials. Free to walk wherever he wants, he dawdles, all his senses in alert... we wrote once about him at the time of the exhibition Ineffable présence. Pierre Duclou is a spotter in a lookout, a researcher of sensations who tracks the signs of passing emotions. Combining engraving and painting, he captures and prints them into the substance of the painting with the ever-changing unexpected processes of stamping. Signs, here, are permanently moving, elusive, like the reminiscences, tracks and footprints of some voluptuous and always elusive sensations. Signs, tracks and footprints that lead us towards the realm of pure aesthetic pleasure.

Elisabeth OULES

Elizabeth OULES bends, creases and smooths out metal, this tough material which seems to have an unalterable appearance. She prints onto it the breathing of Time, the erosion of rust, of an overstepped world. Each sculpture is a concentrate of time where the material becomes mind. Patinas and colours, such as a slight air deposit on the roughness of the metal, take the sculpture off its earthly attachments. Then arises poetry, always in ambush: « For me, said Elizabeth OULES, poetry and colour are closely related and reproduce balance (as the natural balance of the tree), where the form harmonizes with the space from which it is part. » Within these architectures, antique reminiscences of Greece, Egypt or elsewhere, often loom some hieratic and vertical silhouettes. Everywhere man has established signs, traces and footprints as so many links with Heaven.

 Biographies

Monique DOLLE-LACOUR

 Graduate of the National Higher Schools of Applied Arts and Fine Arts, Paris, he took part in several art fairs, Biennals and Exhibitions of Contemporary Art, between 1979 and 2009: Salon de Mai - Grands et Jeunes - Jeune peinture - Bagneux - Mac 2000 - Gand - Strasbourg - Stockholm - SAGA etc ....

Solo exhibitions: Galerie du Fleuve - Médiart - Astarte - Brissot & Linz, Paris, between 1989 and 2008...

Municipal Gallery of Blanc-Mesnil 1990 - Stade de France 2008 - Theatre d’Aubervilliers, 2009.

Frequent stays in Saudi Arabia from 1993 to 2008, personal exhibitions at the Embassy of France in Riyadh, Jeddah Art Gallery.

Dollé-Lacour’s work can be found in several private and public collections: National Fund for Contemporary Art - Departmental Fund of Contemporary Art - OPHLM Aubervilliers - Drancy Cities Dugny, Cachan, Fresnes, Le Blanc-Mesnil - Saint-Maur Museum - TOTAL tower, Paris La Défense - Plaine Development Corporation Plaine Commune - Company McLaren Jeddah - Banks' Saoudi al Fransi "Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam .

 Pierre DUCLOU

 Born in 1957, Pierre DUCLOU lives and works in Seine-Saint-Denis. Early on, he made the choice of abstract painting and exhibited regularly since 1979.

« Duclou’s paintings create a dialogue between materials and colors. The expressiveness of materials and the gladness of his chromatic variations are engaged in a permanent conversation. Poetry and sensuality spurts out from this fertile and joyous jousting» (Sylvie LESCOUZERES)

Permanently displayed at the Galerie ART aujourd'hui, Paris, Galerie Beranger, Tours, Synthesis Gallery, Bruxelles.

 Elisabeth OULES

 Writing, drawing and sculpture are in the same trip, a route without boundaries where words are shapes and forms are wrote, traced since my first artistic attempts. After having been admitted, 1973, to the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, the wandering of a sinuous quest leads me to sculpture while writing is performed in the poetry collections, among them the last one: « L’aube franchie » published in 2010. Stages and encounters have marked this journey; the Stations of the Cross commissioned artwork by the listed church of Grosrouvre (Yvelines), fourteen sculptures over two years and a unique opportunity of expression; the encounter with my editor, exhibitions and festivals in formal or unlikely places: « Cap sur les arts » in Perros Guirec, Espace Commines in Paris, the Arnoux Gallery, l’espace Bourdelle in Montauban and the foundation Datris in Isle sur la Sorgue, exclusively dedicated to sculpture; majors exhibitions in Canada and in France, at the Maison de l’Architecture in Amiens ; a memorable solo exhibition in the beautiful island of Aegina, Greece, all related to beautiful human encounters. Elisabeth Oulès (trans. PhR.)