Solo show
Opening
Thursday 07 November 2024
To mark thirty years of collaboration between the La Forest gallery in Divonne and the artist
with the artist Alexandre Hollan, an exceptional exhibition presents his latest
his latest works.
Alexandre Hollan is an artist who, for nearly sixty years, has spent four months a year
four months a year in the Occitan countryside near Montpellier. He works there
in the silence of a Cezannian landscape, in the patience of a motif that nourishes
“his research”, as he puts it. Like any great work that has chosen
its subject and returns to it again and again, Alexandre Hollan is deepening his meditation
on the visible and perception from the trees (which he visits like old friends and to which he has given names).
old friends and to whom he has given names), still lifes (which he calls “silent lives”), and
silent lives”), and – the most recent stage in his creation – “rays of light
of light through colour”. These three components of his work, with their
These three components of the work, with their variations and surprises, underpin a work of spiritual intensity,
which the poet and friend Yves Bonnefoy once commented on. The scholar
Chair of Poetry at the Collège de France twenty years ago,
the keys to understanding the ‘presence’ that inhabits Hollan’s works.
What is it that, at the limits of the perceptible, pulsates deep within reality?
What do we see when we look? These are just some of the thoughts
the charcoals, oils and distempers in the exhibition.
Thierry Grillet,
Writer and essayist
