Ceysson & Bénétière

 

Curated by Anne Favier.

From the 16th century onwards, landscape became a ‘pictorial genre’ - according to the academic classification - with the backgrounds of paintings moving towards the foreground, opening up new iconic fields. 

Structured by the gaze, the landscape is first and foremost an operation of framing, a projection of the outside world, a construction of the distant, an imaginary expanse, a process of artification: seeing the world in landscapes. Artists are constantly reconfiguring this invention and questioning the horizons of landscape-making.

Painting after the landscape genre, which breaks into Pierre Buraglio's work. The artist manages to tear apart the dramaturgy of the picturesque and return to the painting. For example, he breaks down the mechanics of the horizon: connected, mounted, framed, two sections are distinguished in planes and create the illusion of a panorama, but at the same time they take us back to the materiality of their surfaces. Other bits and pieces - truncated silkscreen frames, fragments of gleaned landscape paintings, architectural remnants - are assembled into painted landscapes. In addition, the sections of glazed frames and coloured uprights/glass are metonymic landscapes, reminding us that ‘the window is the place of the landscape. The landscape takes place in the window’. Through the window, the ‘outside’ becomes landscape. The veduta is therefore embedded in the iconic 2CV door, like a frame, like a painting. It contains the memory (the ‘lived experience’ according to the artist) of the landscapes it has travelled through. Her window, which has seen the landscapes she has cropped pass by, is enhanced with paint. Overlapping the surface, the horizontal brushstrokes make the glass opaque and screen the illusion of perspective. ‘The horizon is the painting,’ says Pierre Buraglio. 

Jérémy Liron's luminous blue skies, like pictorial screens stretched across the surface of the canvas, echo Buraglio's paradoxical ‘flat depth’. Liron also partitions the landscape, arranging, syncopating and decoupling planes, depicting the landscape as the architecture of the eye. The conventional landscape format is often overturned: in vertical compositions, the contrasting landscape elements are variously reframed by structures that they extend, overflow or redouble. Frames and windows shape Jérémy Liron's landscapes and highlight their geometric rhythm. At the same time, plant and organic motifs disrupt the squareness of this framework. The artist also lets the edges of his paintings reveal the layers of paint underneath. In this way, the depths represented are folded back into coloured planes on the surface of the representation. In places, the landscape outside the frame is still projected in light and shadow.

The photographs in Tania Mouraud's Borderland ensemble are also luminous projections of the surrounding landscape. In the middle of fields, on roadsides, it is the glittering punctuations of straw bales wrapped in shiny plastic that catch her eye. Their reflective surfaces act like photographic devices. By cropping their photosensitive surfaces close-up, Tania Mouraud eclipses the decomposing plant matter and reveals the landscape in the background. Like skins, their crumpled, wrinkled textures are also reminiscent of the striations of a paintbrush. The pictorialist photographs in the Borderland ensemble disturb the eye. With the optical system in floating focus, the landscape dissolves into impressionistic luminous phenomena. 

the sheets of colour entangled in ink on paper. The luminous, organically modulated fields of colour dissolve any focal point, and with it any spatial reference point. As far as the eye can see, the tapering, full-frame inks, like fragments of diaphanous immensity, open up to contemplation. The experience of an unbounded depth of field gives way to the sublime. ‘I'm standing in front of these large panels, these fields [...] playing with gradations, shores, halos [...]. I tip over into sensation. I lose touch with the ground. I gain vertigo’, writes Jérémy Liron. From these vertical abstractions, on the scale of the body, emerge liquid horizons and the impression of pigmented meteorological events that unfold from one work to the next. Beyond all representation, the atmospheric expanses are geological landscapes where the surfaces reveal the diffuse stratigraphy of crystallised veils of colour that radiate through the thickness of the paper. 

The works of Pierre Buraglio, Claire Chesnier, Jérémy Liron and Tania Mouraud, shown alongside each other in this exhibition, reinvest the commonplace of landscape, redefining its points of view and revealing its out-of-focus areas. 

Anne Favier

 

Artists :
Pierre Buraglio
Claire Chesnier
Jérémy Liron
Tania Mouraud

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Visitor Information

Ceysson & Bénétière
21 rue Longue
69001 Lyon

Gallery hours:
Tuesday - Saturday
11am - 6pm
T: +33 4 27 02 55 20