Folded Memories

Group exhibition, 21.05.24 - 26.05.24, Galerie Elsa Meunier + Galerie Mathilde le Coz (15 rue Guénégaud Paris 6), Paris

With Folded Memories, Elsa Meunier and Mathilde Le Coz galleries present the work of four figurative painters from the Parisian and international scene: the French artists Nathan Bertet and Nicolas Gaume, the Australian Shanti Shea An and the German Filip Henin. They all paint freely between reminiscences and imagination, memories folded by memory, enhanced by thought, deployed by their paintbrushes.

Through her perspectives and the simplification of certain elements, Shanti Shea An unfolds on the canvas an image recomposed by her memory. In the oil on canvas Blue skies at night (2023) it is indeed the green interior of a Parisian apartment, a vivid memory of a past trip, that the artist represents. Night enters through the window, a blue square with a Haussmannian railing which alone locates the scene. In Fill and refill (2024), the colours pass from one thing to another and the objects, reduced to essential geometric shapes, punctuate the composition - on the sensitive surface of the painting, the artist captures the comings and goings of a gesture that is repeated, a gesture that carries the memory of its past occurrence.

Painter of memory, Nathan Bertet immerses himself during long walks in the landscapes that surround him in Palaiseau before recomposing them in his studio. An intimate studio without windows nor natural light, a studio without any visual distraction, a forge of memory which takes shape and colour through the prism of the painter’s eye and emotions. The two oils on canvas from 2024 presented in the exhibition are invaded by dense, tight vegetation, counterbalanced by a delimiting urbanity: a fence, an electric wire, a section of a house. A duality which embodies the artist’s hometown imbued with the memory of years of walks - Nathan Bertet has always crossed these spaces.

For the painter Nicolas Gaume, reminiscence allows the development of a motif that he exhausts through serial work. Initially painting from a model, the portrait of the person represented disappears as the painter captures the essence of his or her lines. The subject vanishes while the bones of a face are revealed which, from canvas to canvas, from gaze to gaze, bears its own individuality. For Nicolas Gaume, memory is a source that must be experienced through repetition to become this other who inhabits his canvas.

Imagination replaces memory for the German painter Filip Henin whose work, full of references, seems to detach itself from a tangible reality to unfold in a fiction of the strange, disturbing on the verge of a nightmare. In the oil on wood Il y a un soleil (2024), the painter takes us on a lonely nocturnal road trip lit only by the headlights of a car coming out of nowhere. The driver’s confusion and isolation activates in the viewer a memory of emotions, lodged near our unconscious, which houses our folded memories, put aside, our Folded Memories.

Photography: Margot Montigny