Art at the Domaine by the Ceysson and Benetière gallery

Rémy Jacquier (born in 1972) is a French artist whose work explores the links between measurement, rhythm, and space. Through drawing, sculpture, and installation, he translates rational structures—derived from music, writing, or architecture—into sensory forms. His work questions how thought can be transformed into volume and gesture.

Born from a long-standing collaboration between Bernar Venet and the owners of the estate, Jacqueline and Olivier Ginon, this project establishes a dialogue between recent works and older creations.

The exhibition explores the omnipresence of the line, a fundamental element in Bernar Venet's work, where art and science converge in a constant tension. "The artistic project is not about 'making sculptures with steel bars,'" writes Thierry Lenain, "but about making present, within an artistic context, lines incorporated into steel bars." Straight, curved, or indeterminate, these lines rise, lean, unfold, or collapse, as if to test the very limits of form and gravity. Suspended, arched, or stacked, they question sculpture not as volume, but as phenomenon.

As visitors explore the exhibition, they also discover the Gribs series, which began almost by accident in the early 2010s. "Hundreds of scribbles are drawn on small pieces of cardboard," explains Olivier Schefer. "Some lines are cut with a blowtorch, others are deliberately drawn with eyes closed, to achieve a freer, more nervous, more uncontrolled gesture." This controlled disorder, which evokes an eruption of chaos, marks a new stage in the artist's trajectory, further expanding the realm of possibilities.

Finally, the Stacks—these stacks of Corten steel arches—perfectly encapsulate the radical nature of the Venetian gesture: “My goal is to limit interpretation so that my sculpture is perceived in its intrinsic, physical reality,” the artist states. “A real object in a real world.”

Since his first coal piles in the 1960s, Venet has explored the notion of immanence, while affirming a raw materiality: "Steel seems to me to be the ideal material... noble and neutral at the same time, malleable enough for what I want to do."

A key figure in the dialogue between art and mathematics, Bernar Venet established himself on the international scene in the 1970s. Based in New York and later in Le Muy, where he established his foundation, he pursues a body of work that combines conceptual rigor, powerful visual expression, and formal audacity. This exhibition at the Domaine de Panéry pays tribute to an extraordinary career and celebrates, in a unique setting, the dynamism of a constantly evolving oeuvre.

Nominated for the 2025 Marcel Duchamp Prize, the artist continues his exploration of the mineral and the animal by introducing pozzolana, a volcanic powder used in Roman cement. The result is poetic, sensitive, and unsettling works that foster a broader reflection on life. Through this exhibition, Sabatté opens a new chapter in his work, rooted in the materiality of the world and confronting us with the inevitable passage of time.

Pozzolana, linked to both the history of humanity and that of the Earth, becomes a new field of experimentation for Sabatté. Continuing his bestiary, the artist shapes creatures emerging from the ashes, birds that, like the phoenix, are reborn. These sculptures embody the suspended moment when matter seems to self-repair, between destruction and reconstruction, a disturbing echo of the processes of life.

In addition to this group of sculptures, there is a series of oil paintings also created with pozzolana, this time mixed with fragments of silk fabric. Lionel Sabatté works directly on the floor. He pours different dilutions of liquid onto his canvas, revealing organic and fluid forms, shaping a universe where new creatures emerge. Through these gestures, he explores the relationship between chance and control, figuration and abstraction, birth and dissolution. Silk, linked to the metamorphosis of the butterfly, and pozzolana—a volcanic rock, a symbol of destruction—weave a dialectic between the mineral and the organic, the ephemeral and the timeless, birth and chaos.

Commentators on the work of Christian Floquet (born in Geneva in 1961) have often discussed the relationship of his paintings to the exhibition wall: the careful application of paint with a roller—to avoid any sense of texture—flat areas without modeling, and two-dimensional space. They have also emphasized the interplay between background and figure, which in this respect is reminiscent of some of the questions raised by the Supports/Surfaces artists around 1970.

But few have explored the importance of the oblique and asymmetry in Floquet's work. These elements, true masters of this interplay, literally barring the canvas and contrasting with the parallel lines of the frame and the wall, reveal the very pictorial quality of the painting. And when vivid, intense color reinforces the imbalance of masses, it simultaneously (de)constructs space. As for white, which the painter sometimes uses instead of color, it allows him to integrate—through the space that exists between fullness and emptiness—the idea of ​​the wall into the heart of the work.

Linked to a movement that inherited from Op Art, Concrete Art, and Minimalism, Floquet here undertakes to update and rethink research begun by his predecessors after the Second World War. His quest is also one of absolute sobriety, constantly reiterated. His obsession with geometric form and background—and their interplay created by the optical illusion of collapsing planes—has been reaffirmed in his work with rare and beautiful consistency for over twenty years.

Text by Camille Vieville

May 4, 2024. "Frank Stella is dead."
It's 11:30 PM and I receive this text message from a painter friend.
I look at the New York Times page announcing the death of the man commonly known as the precursor of minimalism. The major American daily headlines "master of reinvention." I am deeply moved, because I am currently writing this text, begun a few days earlier, about the exhibition of the artist's last works this summer at the Domaine de Panéry. I realize that the exhibition is becoming a tribute. And this text, straddling the before and after, is a kind of transition.

I'm looking for images of his Black Paintings, which disrupted art history. In particular, this vibrant painting of a grid of black and white lines titled "Die Fahne Hoch!" (Raise the Flag High!), a reference to a chilling Nazi party chant. An abstraction, yes, but with a dizzying meaning that here has no need to unfold in figuration. The narrative flows naturally from the form, so powerful is it. It's a true history painting, yet completely abstract. Unprecedented. This is Frank Stella's artistic revolution of the early 1960s.

Subsequently, his approach would continually challenge the possibilities of extending the original flatness of the canvas. For the artist, a painting was not an image, but a "working space": the site of all possible transformations and explorations, the place where thought was fulfilled, where a symbolic vision of the world was constructed; let us dare to evoke here, a few centuries later, Leonardo da Vinci's "cosa mentale" (mental mind). Stella's pictorial research extended the essentiality of form to its maximum, starting from an original point: Josef Albers's square, Jean Hélion's cone, Matisse's cut-outs, Velázquez's illusionism, Tintoretto's projected perspective... Of course, listing all these revolutionary predecessors might seem like a laundry list. However, in Stella's case, this enumeration is far from being a cliché. For his artistic vision never ceased to question the meaning of modernism and the avant-garde in painting, but also to interrogate the power of formalism. "Formalism" is, moreover, a controversial word, given how much 20th-century art history attempted to combat it in favor of the conceptual, the idea, and, more recently, documentary and sociological approaches. The question of formal power nevertheless remains Stella's central theme, who, like Richard Serra in the field of sculpture (who died a month before him), succeeded in evolving the notion of flatness into entirely innovative three-dimensional territories. The almost simultaneous passing of these two giants seems to signal the end of an era.

Stella's true achievement lay in his audacious handling of form, which led him to perhaps be the only one to have successfully developed his minimalist lines and grid into what he ultimately called "maximalism." Much like how Italian primitivism, two centuries later, gave rise to Baroque extravagances. Some have interpreted this as a change of style. This is incorrect. It represents absolute continuity in terms of perpetual reinvention.

The works from recent years, presented in the exhibition, are a masterful demonstration of this. Let us first consider the work on paper from the series Illustrations after El Lissitzky's "Had Gadya," dated 1985. It could almost be considered a manifesto, so openly does it relate to the Russian avant-garde artist El Lissitzky, paying direct homage to his mastery of geometric simplicity while setting it in motion through an animation of colorful overlays evoking the rhythm of the traditional Passover song, "Had Gadya." He introduces the motif of the wave, which he would later revisit in his famous series inspired by Herman Melville's novel, Moby-Dick, in which he brilliantly blends various engraving techniques with collage and hand-colored highlights. These aggregates of forms seem like an abstract Baroque response to the revolution of Paul Cézanne's figurative Cubism. This response reached its zenith in the immense painting Karpathenburg II of 1996, an impressive pictorial symphony where geometric forms break free from the canvas, which seems to be, in itself, a synthesis of all previous avant-garde movements, be it Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Geometric Abstraction, Lyrical Abstraction, and so on. Then, from the 2000s onward, his painting transformed into reliefs of fascinating complexity, combining steel, fiberglass, aluminum, and thermoformed plastic (RPT). Their multicolored swirls intertwine, almost taking flight. Internal membranes of a car engine or a living organism? We circle around the question. Painting trophies. Music trophies for the series inspired by Scarlatti's Sonatas. Fishing trophies, too. Their titles evoke, for some, rivers and lakes of the Gaspé Peninsula, a region of Quebec where the artist loved to stay. Painting, here transformed into sculpture, is an imaginary territory that synthesizes the world, in its infinitely large and infinitely small dimensions, with its multiple variations. For the artist, it is fundamentally a question of space that can expand infinitely. Within these works, the increasingly prominent motif of the star is also noticeable. An idea of ​​the expanding universe? Particularly evident in the monumental star sculpture in teak. Stella, let's not forget, means star. Minimalist, constructivist, baroque, expressionist, illusionist, maximalist… Stella, without artistic boundaries, except for his fidelity to painting. He was absolutely futuristic and has now joined the stars.

Julie Chaizemartin, May 2024.

Nicolas Momein's artistic practice often unfolds from the study of trivial and functional objects and materials - from agricultural equipment for shoeing cows to slippers, from cotton bath towels to living room sofas, via various materials: salt stone, soap, leather, rock wool, etc. - and develops through the identification of gestures and techniques from industry or craftsmanship.

This almost anthropological approach is associated with constantly renewed learning because the artist has to understand and repeat these gestures, reuse these machines, collaborate with workers or craftsmen, in short, put himself in the position of making, unmaking or reshaping these objects and materials.

Nicolas Momein freely and artistically reinterprets a wide range of techniques and know-how, diverting them from their initial purposes. For example, in his recent series "Skin to Skin," initiated in 2022 during a residency in partnership with a leather and hide processing and finishing factory, the artist explores the properties and pictorial potential of pigmented aluminum foil, intended for industrial mounting. These sheets, coated with a film of colored metallic pigment, are used by the leather industry to transfer and fix glossy colors onto coated surfaces through thermal application.

Nicolas Momein appropriates this material for treating and ornamenting the surfaces of manufactured goods by modifying the mechanical stamping process. Working cold, through direct pressure of pigmented sheets deposited on canvas or vinyl surfaces, he blindly transfers his hand-drawn designs, guided but not pre-programmed. The highly colorful works unfold like improvisations, composed of rhythmic variations of gestures, oscillating between ornamental abstraction and primitive figuration, seismographic writing and flat planes of color.

While these strange, baroque, and flamboyant landscapes reveal a stratigraphy of traces accumulated in layers, they nevertheless possess a thin, film-like structure. Indeed, the technical process prevents the superimposition of applications: each transfer of colored material is therefore permanent and cannot be removed or covered over.

And while these pieces resemble paintings, they are actually structured like marquetry, composed of tiny layers (films) of metallic pigments that fit together perfectly on their support. But these films crease, leave marks, sometimes even seem hammered, and ambiguously gain thickness… like tanned or even scarred hides, or like industrial metal dies discreetly stamped with textile ornament motifs.

This series is part of his ongoing research during an artist residency organized by the Le Lait art center in Graulhet, where Nicolas Momein began working with the "Eureka" factory, specializing in the thinning and finishing of leathers and hides. From laceration to delicate gestures, the works explore the intimate relationship between the support and the medium.

It is this hybrid language, between technique and poetic extrapolation, that Momein proposes to question through this new series produced between the factory and the workshop for his upcoming exhibition at Ceysson & Bénétière in April.

The evanescent landscapes that Tušek painted in the late eighties observed the fundamental law of the genre, that of a horizon separating the earth from the sky; yet the latter was stretched in such a way that its disappearance was in the end inevitable.

With his paintings from 2006 to 2019, designated as "forests", the space is without landmarks, the gaze is lost in a tight jumble of green and blue hues, sometimes brown, whose material presents regular patterns.

Tušek's technique involves applying not canvas to canvas, but rather sheets of bubble wrap impregnated with paint. Through this method—in a single movement, the bubble wrap deposits, repels, and absorbs the paint—depth appears across the entire surface, and the viewer is led to lose themselves in successive accidents that ultimately resolve into a coherent whole.

The emergence of a figurative process is once again random, but terribly effective: we are confronted less with the already accomplished image of a landscape than with the cellular formation of what ultimately constitutes it before our very eyes. As we know, a landscape only exists for someone sufficiently detached from it to see it as such; the undergrowth, for its part, only finds its own reality for someone who loses themselves in it, a fictional walk and an actual gaze combined in the same disquiet.

The forest Mitja Tušek dreams of can be understood as that which predates all
civilization, which no path crosses, which no clearing cuts, from which the sky would be observable.

A world unto itself before the civilizing enterprise that made it visible by subjugating it, a "nature" that cannot even be designated as such. "Without these outer lands," "the persecuted, the outcasts, the lost, the mystics sought refuge," there is no longer, for Robert
Harrison, "of interiors to live in".

The undergrowth of Tušek belongs to a domain entirely foreign to such pretensions
human, unfold as an essentially unknown region, but in which
precisely he can once again exercise his senses, outside the law that forces the gaze to recognize a vanishing point.

These forests do not refer to any model. They manifest themselves with the same abrupt character, the same aplomb as a reality that invents itself entirely in place of the gaze.

Alain Cueff, excerpt from the text "The Axis of Painting", 2018