→ Informations: info@lefeuvreroze.com
Always The Same
14 March - 13 April 2019
Opening on Thursday 14 March from 6pm
With the artist in attendance
Unusually, it is with a solo exhibition that Le Feuvre & Roze gallery and Thomas Vergne mark the beginning of their collaboration. From 14 March, the gallery will be offering visitors an immersion into the abstract, sensitive, deep, geometric universe of the French artist, through (among other things the presentation of a hundred or so oils on canvas, size 18x14 cm, belonging to a continuous series begun in 2012.
About Thomas Vergne:
PAINTING IN THE LIGHT OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Thomas Vergne's practice focuses on the absolute of painting. This absolute is its origin and its essence. The construction of Thomas Vergne's paintings is organised like a work circuit, according to a daily routine and rigour. From the sketchbook, on which he carries his intuitions, he then transfers to the canvas, almost always in the same format, a juxtaposition of shapes and colours. Geometric, minimal in the numbering of its elements, methodological and serial in its elaboration, this painting developed in contact with Jean-Michel Alberola's studio a few years ago at the Beaux-Arts in Paris bears traces of a whole history of North American painting of the 1960s (Blinky Palermo, Ellsworth Kelly...).
Despite the distancing that this painting may show, it bears the symptoms of a pervasive intimacy, which is revealed in other ways. In the Shadows series, begun in 2016, a set of shadows perceived from her living room or her studio is portrayed in large format. Sharing with us a banal point of view on everyday life, he leaves an empty space on all these paintings. By not filling the canvas completely, he leaves the scene in suspense and undoes any illusion of a feigned painting, as a window on the world. This emptiness of the canvas manifests the presence of the painting. It is here, in front of us; without being yet another icon that would transport us to an unknown destination.
Without going so far as to describe this practice as an ecology of painting, this work nonetheless lays the foundations for a rehabilitation of much-discredited medium. While contemporary practices and post-modernism have done away with a hierarchy of practices, this linking of media takes us back to the essentiality of painting. In the age of dematerialization and without any hint of reactionary thinking, Thomas Vergne's practice emancipates itself from the complexes of the history of his medium to move towards its methodological reconstruction. And this through a research on the perception of the everyday; those moments that we look at without seeing, that we frequent without feeling: the sweep of the light on our bodies, the colour of the objects that surround us, and the beauty of their shadows.
- Guillaume Clerc