Bernard Moninot — Lumière fossile — Catherine Putman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 16 → November 10, 2022

The gallery has pleasure in presenting Lumière fossile, an exhibition of work by Bernard Moninot. It follows a large retrospective devoted to the artist and that ran from July 2021 to June 2022 at three different institutions: Domaine de Kerguéhennec in the Morbihan, the Musée de l’Hospice Saint-Roch at Issoudun and Fondation Maeght at Saint-Paul de Vence.
These exhibitions showed the work done over the last 10 years and were accompanied by a monograph Le Dessin élargi with texts by Catherine Millet and Jean-Luc Nancy. It was published by In Fine Editions.

The exhibition at the gallery will show a selection of recent works, including delicate _Lumières fossiles _sculptures made by linking pentacrines—animal fossils dating back 200 million years—with piano string. Resembling constellations, they are hung slightly away from the wall. Shadows appear and enhance their very graphic mark in space. These items are emblematic of the work of Bernard Moninot, who combines a scientific spirit with great poetry and sees drawing in the ‘broad’ sense.
He seeks to grasp the untouchable, questions natural phenomena and the elements. Light, wind and sky are central to his approach and to his works in which he tries to show the invisible.

A selection of drawings will also be displayed, including the series_ Cadastres_ and La voie lactée. Bernard Moninot’s drawing is a free line in ink on a white or black background. Almost musical, it is a permanent search for the memory discussed by Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘the strange memory of what was never placed in a recollection’.

Bernard Moninot was born in Le Fay (Saône-et-Loire) in 1949.
He lives and works in Paris and in Château-Chalon in the Jura.

He studied at Les Beaux-Arts in Paris at the end of the 1960s and started showing his work in 1970 at the Paris Biennial, the CNAC, Galerie Lucien Durand and then at Galerie Karl Flinker.

His first solo exhibition was in 1974 at the Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain in Saint-Étienne. He then participated regularly in large joint exhibitions at the documenta in Kassel, the Musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris (MAMVP) and the museum in Les Sables d’Olonne. Another solo exhibition was held in 1979—at Fondation Maeght this time—proposed by Jean-Louis Prat.

In the 1980s he continued his work, focused increasingly on the study of natural phenomena and with the aim of extending the limits of drawing. He made public commissions and taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bourges and then at that in Angers.

In the 1990s, he showed his work at the Galerie Montenay in Paris and at Andata/Ritorno in Geneva. In 1997, a new solo exhibition opened at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, directed by Daniel Abadie, and the following year at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dôle and also in museums in Scotland and Finland.

From 1999 onwards, he started to collect ‘dessins du vent’ (‘drawings of the wind’) using an instrument that he invented. This undertaking named L_a Mémoire du vent_ resulted in travel—and exhibitions—in many countries for more than 20 years.

He showed his works at the Galerie Baudoin Lebon from 2005 to 2012 and taught drawing at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 2006 to 2015.

The year 2009 marked the start of his collaboration with Galerie Catherine Putman.
He continues to make substantial installations and participates in numerous projects, exhibitions,
journals and fairs related to drawing, that he still practices intensely.

A monograph published in 2013 by Editions André Dimanche examines his work from 1972 to 2012.
He then started to work with Galerie Jean Fournier in 2015.
From 2021 to 2022 a solo exhibition was held at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec in the Morbihan, curated by Olivier Delavallade. It continued at the Musée de l’Hospice Saint-Roch at Issoudun and finished at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence.
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There are three exhibitions to be seen in summer 2022 :
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Bernard Noël — Bernard Moninot, Un toucher aérien,_ Musée départemental des Hautes-Alpes, Gap
La Mémoire du vent, Bernard Moninot at the Château de Talcy in the Loire
Le Vent. «Cela qui ne peut être peint», Musée d’art moderne André Malraux — MuMa Le Havre