THE FLEETINGNESS OF THINGS
November 8 - December 23, 2017
paintings by:
Nicole BOTTET - Véronique NÉROU - Christian PERRIER
sculptures by Gisèle LACROIX
" Nothing is constant except change" would have said Buddha.
There is no need to immerse ourselves in Oriental thought in order to say that the existence of all things is ephemeral. The artists of this exhibition, Nicole BOTTET, Christian PERRIER, Véronique NÉROU and Gisèle LACROIX, explore this evanescence of beings and things. They free themselves from the supposed evidence of reality to reveal its instability. Nothing is fixed in its appearance, everything is grasped in evanescence. Things appear and disappear at the same time, and singularly, this blurred gaze, this fragility reinforce the presence of the artwork as an invitation to immerse ourselves and perceive our own impermanence.
Nicole BOTTET
Impermanence is the heart of Nicole Bottet's work, as we already saw at the gallery's inaugural exhibition (Eloge de la délicatesse, April 2013). Her paintings then resonated in a beautiful contrast with the sculptures of Gisèle Lacroix.
Nicole BOTTET's work thus magnifies the unstable and fragile presence of the most humble everyday objects. Her garden's flowers offer her infinite variations for such a contemplation. And the beauty of flower never appears so great as when its petals fall one after an other. Absence, then, stands at the heart of presence, like fragments of yellowed letters, testimonies of a forgotten life. A bittersweet melancholy touches our hearts, and our gaze is astonished by so much audacity in delicacy.
Véronique NÉROU
Véronique NÉROU lives and works "elsewhere", mostly in India and Thailand. But let us not expect from her painting seductions of an easy exoticism. Colours and light, emanating from her works, at first catches by surprise our Western gaze, but we are instantly transported into the inner truth of the work. Its warm and saturated colours tell the flavor of spices, the luminous dazzling captures the lived intensity of the moment. This painting, at the same time, arouses strong and serene emotions. One feels silence, wind, light and the color of primordial encounters during fleeting moments. Time passes through beings and things and gently deposits a subtle and warm beauty.
Christian PERRIER
"I may sometimes sketch figures, anonymous plants, approximate utensils, improbable architectures, and immediately, want defiguring them, deforming them, abolishing them, crushing them, in order to avoid image, because image encloses, bridles the imaginary and falls in anecdotical and literature." writes Christian PERRIER who was for long a teacher specialist ("agrégé") of french literature while he was painter in a parallel life. His painting, however, neither tells nor describes anything. It reveals "the trembling and threatened presence of things", which words do not tell. His refusal to give titles to his paintings leaves the glance between presence and absence traveling to the heart of the indefinite. Praise of uncertainty at the root of mystery, the paintings of Christian Perrier do not show things, but open to the eternal enigma of existence: why is there something rather than nothing?
Gisèle LACROIX
Gisèle LACROIX's sculptures suggest the transition between two worlds. From the mineral to the organic, enigmatic figures emerge, as if they were hostages of a rock wall or embarked towards an elsewhere that nobody knows.
The tense space of Gisèle Lacroix sacralizes powerfully this moment of the passage seized in the eternity of the bronze.
She confronts this challenge by giving solidity to intangible transitions. And the strong tensions that punctuates the space of her sculptures are a call for monumentality.
Biographies
Véronique NÉROU
Born in Paris. Studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, studios Léonardo Cremonini and Pierre Carron.
Selected and exhibited at the Institut de France as part of the Paul Louis Weiller Portrait Award.
1990-2008: Portraitist activity with which she finances her studies and begins her career as a painter.
Shares her life between France, India and Thailand.
Exhibitions:
2014, 2015 International Exhibition of Printing and Drawing, Galerie Le coin des arts, Grand Palais, Paris.
2013 TAYLOR Foundation, Paris,
Permanently: galleries Le Coin des Arts - Peinture Fraiche - ART aujourd'hui, Paris.
Christian PERRIER
Born in 1950, Christian Perrier lives and works in Bourges (Cher, France).
Studies of classical literature and self-training in painting through the practice of materials and
the attendance of museums and galleries. From 1981 to 1985, he directs "Ici et là" magazine of contemporary art in the Center Region.
After an interruption of almost ten years, began to paint again in 2008 and has since regularly exhibited in France and the Netherlands.
Nicole BOTTET
After studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Nicole Bottet received an award at the Académie Française and a prize from the Nichido Gallery in Tokyo. This was followed by numerous solo exhibitions in France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, China and Japan.
Her works are featured in numerous private and public collections around the world, including the Albertina Museum in Vienna and the Salzburg Museum in Austria, the Nichido Kasama Museum in Japan.
Recent personal exhibitions:
2012: Gallery 48 (Lyon) - Nichido Gallery (Tokyo and Nagoya)
2013: Galerie ART aujourd'hui (Paris)
2014: Koo Gallery (Hong Kong) - Museum Schloss Ritzen (Saalfelden) Austria
2015: Galleries Mönch (Bremen) Germany - Nichido (Paris and Tokyo)
2016: Art Elysées, Paris, gallery Nichido.
Permanently :
Galleries Welz, Salzburg (Austria) - D'Étraz, Lausanne (Switzerland) - Nichido (Tokyo-Nagoya-Paris) - ART aujourd'hui, Paris.
Gisèle LACROIX
Born in Lyon, she studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Lyon and is graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Licence of Plastic Arts, Sorbonne, Paris 1.
Maitre-assistant, School of Architecture, Paris Val-de-Marne.
Realization of monumental works for architecture. Participations in the major Parisian Salons: Jeune Sculpture - Comparaisons - Salon de Mai - Biennale 109 ... Head of sculpture section for the Biennale 109.
Numerous individual and collective exhibitions, in France and abroad.
1999: Paul Louis Weiler Prize, Académie des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
2007: Dumas-Millier Prize, Academie des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
2008: Charles Malfray Grand Prize, Taylor Foundation, Paris.
Images of the exhibition
Video of the exhibition