Jean Charles Blais

Idylls

2 July – 9 October

In the exhibition developed by the artist for the Collection Lambert, the figures and shapes create suspended narratives where the bodies – their shadows? – placed side by side, embraced or languid, invent storylines invading the rooms of the 18th-century mansion just like the ghosts of our past or future lives.

In front of the chapel he uses as a studio in Southern France, Jean-Charles Blais accumulates materials – usually piles of posters collected within public space – to let them experience the passage of time a little longer. A colour range, a tear, a specific or a fortuitous shape, will help to initiate sensitive dialogue between the artist and what is now both the medium and the subject of his experiments. He paints, scratches, cuts, or carves in the mass of agglomerated layers of paper to meticulously excavate the contours of buried bodies which he preserves all the preciousness. By our side, They persist and are resistant to oblivion, “to the vanishing of shapes” in the artist’s words.

The exhibition held at the Collection Lambert was designed around a set of works created especially for the institution from Avignon during spring 2022. Through this event, the artist furthers his working and friendly relationship started with Yvon Lambert in his Parisian gallery forty years ago, in 1982.

Curator : Stéphane Ibars

With the support of Gallery Catherine Issert