Xenithia-Nomade Gallery presents a solo exhibition of works by Jean-Marc Felzenszwalbe from 17 to 26 November 2022. Installed at 13 rue de Saintonge in Paris are two series in dialogue: one has just been created by the artist and has never been shown, while the other was the subject of an exhibition last year in Michelangelo's birthplace.
The choice was made to show three paintings from the most recent series (2022). All three are vertical and of the same dimensions, rectangular, displaying a square positioned at a different height. It is the only visible shape. Between the paintings and within the paintings, a play of shades in red tones. These dry pastels, with their apparent simplicity of composition, are a nod to the experiments of Ligeti and his Musica Ricercata. Deceptive simplicity...
Adjacent to these three vertical paintings are five horizontal paintings from the Horizons series dating from 2020/2021. On the cardboard paper, two colours rub shoulders to form a border between imaginary elongated half-planes. More reds, but also blue, brown, grey, green, white...
The red of the three vertical pastels strikes the eye, occupies the surface and overflows onto the surrounding space. One perceives a sensation of heat with a slightly oppressive, invasive character, despite the delicate and intimate aspect of the dry pigment. These reds respond to each other, as if an underlying violence was touching us, but without explicitly revealing its nature.
Indirect presence, memory of the past, evocation of absence? Looking for interpretations is always perilous... We feel a light breath that makes the square oscillate from one painting to another. However, we only see nothingness through this aperture, provided nothingness means the absence of the living, of things that are familiar to us and of what connects them.
The Horizons series has a different perspective. Its unusual format challenges us and the chosen title pays homage to the understandable desire to give a concrete name to what we see. There is no actual shape in this series: nothing is revealed in the foreground, nothing manifests itself in the distance. Is it actually a horizon? Was the square of the vertical pastels a square, by the way? Let's not forget the arbitrary constructions of language which need to name what we see, to bind perceptions to known shapes. Apart from the red pastels, the colours evoke autumn, even winter. The separation between the two coloured areas is not materialised by any line, as if the horizontal does not separate a sky and an earth, but rather two immaterial clouds, standing neatly next to each other and always separated.
A quote from Morandi, probably apocryphal, says: "I don't paint bottles, but the air around them." In the pastels presented in this exhibition, only the air, its movements and colour variations remain.
Exhibition from 17 to 26 November 2022 in Paris, 13 rue de Saintonge.
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