Statut: Represented

NEWS

“The Hand (and) the Glove”, Exhibition from 17 May to 18 August 2024, Musée Jenisch Vevey (Switzerland)

 

Valérie Novello was born in 1971 in Paris. She lives and works in Gentilly.

Franco-Italian artist born in 1971, Valérie Novello has developed a highly sensitive body of work, at the frontier of sculpture, painting and drawing. A graduate of the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts de Paris, Novello has patiently built up, in the secrecy of the studio, a rich, diverse and profound body of work revealed to the public since 2019 by her numerous exhibitions in Belgium, Italy, France and Taiwan. A precious and delicate discovery that strives to reveal with poetry the presence of memories and things under layers of paper and pigments.

Mainly graphic, his work unfolds at the limits of drawing and sculpture, associating in the treatment of paper techniques of drawing and bas-reliefs, and pushing the territory of drawing towards the domains of glass, wax and plaster, through works that are often monumental.

 

The Remains
The remains echo a past truth, what was – buried things, abandoned places, landscapes, bodies, ruins – through the opacity of time. They are the memory of things and the memory of beings, in their fragility. There is in the remains the presence of a mystery. What are they the remains of? Of what image are they the sign? If everything cannot be explained, if everything cannot be reached, I try to give shape to a mental image – distant and original – that obsesses me. I seek to approach it, to unveil and reveal it in the present. Of this original image, only the incomplete, fragmented remains are revealed. Each new creation is a quest for what I can only imagine and reconstitute by excavating the material – or materials: organic, geological, genealogical. It’s a work that must be constantly renewed.

Valerie Novello

 

Denis Laget was born in 1958 in Valence. He was a laureate of the Villa Médicis (1989/1990).
He lives and works in Paris.

“Portraits, vanities, still lifes, landscapes … Denis Laget maintains his painting in the classical subjects of art history. If we try to list more finely the series that punctuate his work for about thirty-five years, we find: portraits, lemons, skulls, herrings, meat quarters, sheep’s heads, jellyfish, landscapes, flowers, dogs, birds, fig leaves… It is a collection at the same time banal and strange, a kind of cabinet of curiosities, where nothing extraordinary or spectacular imposes itself. Does this mean that all these subjects are random, pure pretexts to paint, images-supports without meaning and without stake in itself?”

Karim Ghaddab
“Do not delete” / “Ne pas effacer”, in Denis Laget
FRAC Auvergne, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, Musée Estrine, 2019.

 

NEWS

L’obscur objet… Des désirs les plus clairs, an exhibition with Nicolas Depart at the Musée Keramis, La louvière, 15 november to 30 October 2024.

Le Peroquet Harelle, Collective exhibition, an exhibition from June 15 to October 30, 2024, Musée des Beaux Arts de Rouen.

Les Veneneuses, an exhibition at the Palais de la Nation in Brussels

 

Sculptor and performer Rachel Labastie (born in 1978) works in ceramics, weaving, and many unusual materials such as raw clay, wicker and ashes. Her art is both deeply rooted in the material and conceptually rich. Through her artistic practice, she pursues the search for a profound truth about humanity, sometimes buried under the weight of history, and often under the artificiality of our lives. Through a wide variety of universes and materials, Rachel Labastie invites us to immerse ourselves into what binds humanity and connects us over time to our history and nature.

Rachel had an important solo exhibition at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in 2021-2022. Her work has been exhibited at Maison rouge, at the FRACs Auvergne, Hauts de France and Nouvelle Aquitaine (MECA), at the Le Magasin de Grenoble Art Center, Huarte art center in Spain, at the TMAG in Hobart in Tasmania, at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, at the Kéramis Museum in La louvière (BE), at the ICEC in Istanbul, at the Château des Adhémar and the Château du Rivau, at the Espace Doual’art in Cameroon, at the Museum of Decorative Arts in the city in Paris, at the Bernard Magrez Foundation, at the Transpalette art center, or more recently at the Parvis de Tarbes art center, La Banque Béthune and les Hortillonnages in Amiens.

 

Born in 1947, Christian Renonciat studied at the Sorbonne and obtained a degree in philosophy.  In 1969, he entered an art workshop in Antibes, where he practiced woodworking for six years.
In 1975, he opened his own workshop in Valbonne where his first sculptures were born.
Back in Paris, Christian Renonciat presented his first exhibition in 1978 at the Alain Blondel gallery.

Renonciat seeks to reach the sensuality of perception to awaken the knowledge of touch.
His works speak to our ears and our hands. The intervention of the artist on the material to arrive at the modelled and the exact folded, of the paper, the plastic or the wool, is spectacular, but Renonciat leaves the spectacle aside, to leave us all to the pleasure of the line, to the softness of the curve, to the tremor of the fold. The sculptor erases any trace of his hand, preferring to open, as he writes, «the prodigious library of sensations in memory». In front of his sculptures one has instantly the sensation of the paper or the envelope at the end of the fingers, with its lightness, and its noise, or that of the cardboard which tears; the softness and the rebound of the foam, the heat of the wool.
Since 1984, Christian Renonciat has followed a second parallel path, monumental creation, for which he combines imagination and technique in very diverse materials (cast steel, bronze, aluminum, gardens, etc.) often with the tone of a dreamlike archeology.
Today, he finds the matter of things in large mural compositions of carved wood, such as tapestries of sheet, plastic, wool, paper or cardboard.

His work is shown in France, Switzerland, Belgium, USA, Japan, China, South Korea… Some of his Installations are in Saumur, Tokyo, Sapporo, Atlanta, San Francisco, Monte-Carlo, Aytré, La Rochelle, Paris, Issy, Reims, London, Seoul, etc.

 

Born in 1977, Tinka Pittoors is a Belgian artist, living and working in Antwerp.

She creates and elaborates colourful structures epoxy and ceramics, often mixed with everyday objects. She has shown in MUKHA Antwerp, SMAK Gent, MMuseum Leuven, Museum aan Zee Den Haag, BAM Mons, Palais d’Iéna, Mol Kiest Kunst, CBK Zeeland, Sidney Biennial,… Tinka Pittoors’ artworks often link the evident joy and playfulness of colours and objects to a subtle underlying violence. One thinks of the disturbing universe of Alice in Wonderland, for the atmosphere, while Niki de Saint Phalle is an interesting reference for these surprising colourful sculptures, with a naïve touch although conveying a deep sensitivity to the main issues of our time.

 

Born in Hungary in 1933, Alexandre Hollan moved to Paris in 1956. For more than fifty years he has developed a very profound body of work which he calls his “Research”. A search for the invisible vibration of trees and things: reaching the limits of the “visible” to touch the true nature of what he is looking at. This major oeuvre has developped through two subjects tirelessly taken up: trees on the one hand, still lifes on the other one, which he calls “Silent Lives”. Alexandre Hollan’s dialogue with many poets such as Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Ancet, Philippe Jacottet or Claude Louis-Combet resulted in more than 40 publications of art books and artists. Many European museums have exhibited his works and acquired them for their collections (Centre Pompidou, Musée Fabre, Fine Arts Museum of Hungary, Planque Collection, Kunsthaus Zürich…).