Lucas Talbotier — Auprès de toi — DUTKO / Ile St. Louis Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 14 → December 14, 2024

Dutko Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition by French artist Lucas Talbotier (b. 1994) from November 14 to December 14, 2024. A collection of large, medium, and small-scale paintings, along with works on paper, will be showcased on this occasion. Titled Auprès de toi, this second exhibition with the gallery highlights the recent evolution of the artist’s work, enriched by new reflections on portraiture, landscapes, and the pictorial expression of feelings tied to sensitivity and grace.

The exhibition catalog will be prefaced by art critic Grégoire Lubineau and will include an exclusive interview between Lucas Talbotier and painter Nathan Bertet (b. 1997, soon to be exhibited at the Jousse Gallery in Paris).

Lucas Talbotier’s painting revolves around a sensitive focus on the physical nature of light, color arrangements, and the balance of forms that are both simple and expressive. Beneath an apparent abstraction, his painting preserves the memory of landscapes. These works are memories, fragments of what remains of immaterial sensations. It is not about what one sees, but rather the trace left by lived experiences.

Talbotier is part of the young Parisian school that emerged from the Beaux-Arts and recently turned to painting without worrying whether it was avant-garde or retrograde. Its heroes, alongside Philip Guston (1913–1980) and Joan Mitchell (1925–1992), are also Lucas’s. In particular, he admires the American generation that was fading away when he was born in 1994: Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993), Agnes Martin (1912–2004), Robert Ryman (1930–2019), and Susan Rothenberg (1945–2020), for example. Before them, of course: Turner, Cézanne, Monet.

Following in their footsteps, he adopts a reflexive painting approach, one that is concerned both with form and color for their own sake—harmony, one might say, in the grand classical tradition—while also aiming to question the interest they evoke by revealing them for what they fundamentally are, beyond any reference or subject: a bit of oil and a bit of color on a stretched piece of fabric.

His works showcase a technique that returns to the fundamentals of painting, before the use of tubes and synthetic colors: he grinds his own pigments and sands his preparations by hand. This lends his paintings a fresco-like quality at times, with a fragile appearance of a work that aims to be mineral despite the gestural energy and strength it seeks to convey. The slow breath of Europe combined with the frenzied pulse of America. Time, frozen yet in motion, as in a painting.

Moreover, in the structure of Lucas Talbotier’s canvases, in their composition, there is a succession of confrontations that express doubt, a constant tension: the vibrant colors of pure pigments are met with a desire for fading, a pale covering of overly bright hues; the continuity of coherent forms, unified in the harmony of carefully assembled blocks, is followed by a need for dissonance, represented by the addition of forms that disrupt the overall dynamics: horizontal lines interrupting oblique or vertical patterns, for example. And the serene, sweeping gestures that provide the framework for the canvases are finally answered by a flurry of small touches that convey a more agitated sense of time.