Folded Memories

21 May - 26 May 2024
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: Brenton McGeachie

The world folding in upon itself

19 April - 7 May 23
ANCA Gallery, Canberra

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A fold can be understood as a crease or pleat, a doubling or an overlapping; it involves enclosing something, reducing its surface area but increasing its complexity and thickness. Artists such as Dorothea Rockburne, Tauba Auerbach and Simon Hantaï have all employed practices of folding within their work. This often leads to unexpected forms and compositions, whilst also making visible a certain tension that persists between our understanding of surface and space within painting. Looking to the art of the seventeenth century, folds also appear in various guises, from the drama and theatricality of folded drapery in baroque art to the depiction of folded paper in illusionistic letter-rack paintings.

Here the gesture of folding is explored through the formal qualities of mirroring and doubling. In some works, a sheet of paper is folded to reveal both sides simultaneously. In others, the fold brings two figures closer together—perhaps into conflict—suggesting an impending break or rupture. Throughout these paintings, the fold becomes a way of reconfiguring an image and meditating upon the processes of painting and looking.

Back to front

3 March - 19 March 2023
Airspace Projects, Gadigal/Sydney

The works in Back to front extend Shanti Shea An’s interest in ideas around flatness, blankness and ambiguity within painted images. Shea An addresses these pictorial concerns through the depiction of scenes that appear still and almost silent, focussing her attention on moments where activity is paused or a sudden recognition is taking place.

The imagery in this exhibition is drawn from the artist’s own photographs as well as film and art historical sources. There are figures who face away from the viewer appearing to be absorbed in activities that take place just beyond the edge of the painting. There are also works which frame a field of colour or space. Blind spots and blank spaces seem to shift in and out of the frame, reflecting on the experience of seeing the world through a viewfinder.

Shanti Shea An’s practice is engaged with an investigation of images, including how they are constructed and how they are read. She is a current PhD candidate at the Australian National University in the School of Art & Design.