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Is it the contrasting decor of his childhood, the aligned houses, an industrial basin set in a natural landscape setting that has imbued Nelio’s artistic universe, whose work plays a symphony of nuances between formal minimalism and abstract expressionism, as an attempt to coexist, within an aesthetic discourse, ideas that appear to be antagonistic?
Although Pablo Zabala began drawing and painting at a very young age before freely developing his visual language in public space through the creation of graffiti and murals that quickly gained recognition, his interest in the artistic practice led him to study Fine Arts in Bilbao. In his view, an accomplished artist must humbly confront the great masters who have marked history and learn to master the techniques of classical painting in order to better forge his own unique identity. It is about inscribing oneself in the artistic common world that precedes us, whether by accepting it as a reference or proposing a path of rupture. To distinguish oneself and build one’s artistic identity does not mean erasing the past or denigrating history: let the nihilists have their illusion of their Promethean egos.
If architecture is the first art, the major art of designing and constructing spaces, it forms the matrix of Chazme’s pictorial research, a formal abstraction inspired by urban geometries and nuanced by a singular chromaticity that opens up a metaphorical perspective. The formal universe unfolding as a web of buildings represents what man encounters in postmodern contemporary life? Are they the internal labyrinths into which our dreams lead us? Are these artifacts meant to connect us or separate us, isolating us in wall-based segregations? Chazme’s work opens up endless questions, both intimate and societal.
Steph Cop inscribes his artistic research in immersion in the Morvan ecosystem where he has set up his studio. The sculpture is part of a vital cycle that the artist explores in its entirety.
By carving fallen trees bearing the stigmas of a memorable history, he prolongs their inscription in the narrative of Man. IX, a series ordered from 9 forms – figures ARO – constituted a major movement in Steph Cop’s work between 2008 and 2020. A movement that developed as an introspective exploration of the relationship between Man and the tree, a stylized and refined projection of the multiple possibilities of being-in-the-world. By chance, during artistic projects, Steph Cop met the photographer Bálint Pörneczi. He wondered with what eye the portraitist would approach his figures of ARO, personifications of the tree. Because, with the ARO cycle coming to an end, the time had undoubtedly come to open up the confrontation between the artist’s self and the figure sculpted in a third-person perspective; the moment to step out of the anthropomorphic mirror and finally be able to understand the tree as a distinct entity, to grasp the sublime in its singularity, to offer it a specific aesthetic, outside the projection of self. The photographer’s eye would thus have been that other presence that allows each person to find their own subjective place. Steph Cop therefore invited Bálint Pörneczi to follow him on his wanderings in the Morvan region, an inspiring source, encountering trees and sculptures, immersed in the artistic process.
The museums are closed, but the galleries remain open and Art has made its way to places where we can still admire the work of artists. The Bon Marché Rive Gauche has given Prune Nourry carte blanche for a monumental installation, Amazone Érogène.
Playing with the volumes of the atrium and the emblematic escalators under the glass roof of the Parisian department store, the artist presents a work composed of a breast, targeted by 888 arrows of wood and feathers on one side, and an arc on the other. An interrogation on femininity in its intimate flesh: the artist has sublimated her personal experience of illness as a means of artistic exploration, perhaps in an attempt to escape the objectification of the body and reintroduce a subjective narrative where protocols can seem to transform the patient into a secondary resident of their own illness?
Do nights steal our joys? More than ever, take advantage of the light of day, the radiance of beauty, and turn to the Arts to find moments of grace. An escape between Provence and the Côte d’Azur, to visit three sublime places dedicated to the Arts: Château La Coste near Aix-en-Provence, the Lambert Collection in Avignon, and the Fondation Maeght in St Paul de Vence.
The Zeer Module, an expanded graphic design that is the material and matrix of the work of Medhi Cibille, a plastic artist from the urban art scene, carries a frenzy that takes on a particular dimension in this period when we are taking great strides to measure the uncontrollable forward momentum that was leading us.
