Frédéric Poincelet — Le Satan — Catherine Putman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 15 → November 4, 2023

The gallery is pleased to show a new exhibition of works by Frédéric Poincelet.
His drawings are figurative without being narrative and are clouded in mystery; some scenes may seem strange. The title of the exhibition, ‘Le Satan’ (Satan) stresses this incongruity while no incarnation of evil is truly present in the works. With a strong taste for esoteric signs—when the artist includes them in his compositions—he is more interested in the temptation of the creator, that of the effects of style or the insidious influences of the trend during a period of the hegemony of figurative painting. But Frédéric Poincelet is now showing works with a formidable balance in the drawing—still with a ballpoint pen and in ink wash colouring—that find their subjects and deliver the artist’s desires. Thus by invoking Satan he revokes him.

« Imagine that the name Frédéric Poincelet should be lost one day following a major computer failure leading to the disappearance of all the sites and library catalogues.
The drawings that would surely remain would then make it necessary to make what we call a name of commodity, as do art historians when archives are lacking to provide us with the identity of an artist whose several strong works show his importance. There is a name that I have always dreamed of : the master of small points, an artist in Ingres’ circle who drew views of Rome using a language full of subtlety, playing precisely on points to draw lines. Frédéric Poincelet would thus be the master of parallel lines or the master of tightly close lines. Whether they are made with a Bic pen to shape shadows on a lawn or halftones on a body, or cushions on a sofa, the lines immediately set a rhythm that is both poetic and rigorous.But we would almost forget this formal language when we look at the scenes in Frédéric Poincelet’s images, half light in which sleeping or dreaming figures have taken position. »

François-René Martin
Teacher of History of Art,
École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, École du Louvre.
Coordinator of the Research Centre at the École du Louvre.

Frédéric Poincelet.
Born in 1967, he lives and works in Paris.

Frédéric Poincelet studied graphic design and has also published art books; he was for a while involved with the Lune Produck publishing house (‘Art Contemporain’ collection). He collaborates, in particular, on the reviews Le dernier cri, Hôpital brut, Bang!, Tecknikart, and Double. Frédéric Poincelet joined the comics publishing house Ego Comme X in 1998. In addition to the books he has produced with this publishing house, in which he is also the official graphic designer, he has produced several illustrated reports for the reviews Bang! and Beaux-Arts Magazine. Building on his last book Mon bel amour, he began collaborating with the magazine Psychologies in 2006, focusing on female sexuality—a collaboration that ended in 2008. In the same year, he produced a two-page report with cartoons on Sasha Grey, the American porn star, for the daily newspaper Libération.

In addition to his career as a comics artist, Frédéric Poincelet is a prominent figure in the contemporary drawing scene; he participated in the exhibition ‘Dessins pointus’, and, together with the collective Frédéric Magazine, of which he is one of the founding members, he participated in the exhibition ‘La force de l’art’ at the Grand Palais. Frédéric Magazine promotes drawing—the practice of drawing that is an art in its own right, that is to say drawing that is not subservient to any other higher artistic practice. Their drawing does not involve making sketches or preliminary studies for a major work, such as a future painting or sculpture. Drawing is its own justification and an end in itself.

The Galerie Catherine Putman has exhibited Frédéric Poincelet’s drawings since 2009. It has published his lithographs and serigraphs since 2016.