Réminiscences

About

Galerie Guido Romero Pierini and Association Rémanence joins with the Darren Baker Gallery to present Réminiscences, a new exhibition of artists united by their exploration of the fundamentals of painting, through its early myths and histories. This reflects back to the beginning of the history of figurative painting and acts as a frame for these artists’ works, each displaying their own original forms of reminiscence.

Reminiscence, the act of recalling a faint past presence is translated by Rosy Lamb into a sense of expectation that inhabits the languid bodies of her paintings, leaving them with a resonating loneliness. Her figures are caught in a strange state of time, caught between the past and the present, between what has happened and what is yet to come.

This dichotomy also presents itself in Jean Pierre Ruel’s paintings as his images are torn from memory but shifted away from reality through his representation. Ruel’s quest to create an accurate narrative is disrupted as the tension between what was seen and what was felt forms ‘a new adventure in each canvas’

The spaces between feeling and reality are also questioned in Marion Tivital’s paintings. Her floating industrial structures impose mysteriously on the landscape, distorting one’s sense of time and place. These sites appear melancholy as they hint at places marked then deserted by their inhabitants, but can also connote fresh ground from which fantasized stories and new life may emerge.

 Throughout the displayed works, there is a focus on what it means to live and to live again, reproducing emotion and sensation, rather than just information. This is found in the bright touch and intense forms of Eric Bourguignon, recalling the blurred images captured from a glimpsed scene or fleeting silhouette. This is similarly evoked in Jérôme Delépine’s misty, ethereal compositions. The ghostly, evanescent faces and landscapes allude to past encounters, their features faded but not forgotten. 

The artists of Réminiscences exhibition therefore question the paradoxes of appearance and disappearance and how it may be constituted in the act of painting. Spianti Julien and Simon Casson drive this point home, showing how painting, unlike photography is the practice par excellence to amalgamate reality and represent the intransigence of memory.