Pierre Mabille — Découpages en séquences — Jean Fournier Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 25 → March 10, 2018

Galerie Jean Fournier is pleased to be presenting Pierre Mabille’s 5th solo exhibition, featuring a group of recent paintings. Since 1997, Mabille has been concentrating on repetition of the same form. One that came to him for the first time as he was reading Fernando Pessoa’s poem “Tabacaria” (The Tobacco Shop), in which the shop’s sign functions as a visual trigger for the development of a narrative.

Mabille’s resort to this protocol — this repetition of the same shape — is above all intended to establish the context for the broadest possible exploration of colour. Once defined and subjected to numerous variations, the form leaves the painter free to focus on the chromatic concerns that have become the subject of his oeuvre. An oeuvre whose tension resides entirely in a balance between repetition and the most recent variations.

The present pictures derive from ideas first addressed in the spring of 2016, in a series of collages created for the Galerie Fournier group show Matisse Now, and considerably expanded on during the summer of 2017 during a residency at the Albers Foundation in Connecticut. Concentrating more on the question of cutout and counterform, Mabille opened up his system to a host of colourful optical possibilities. Fragmented and cut up, his original shape makes play with contrast in compositions that recall certain aspects of the work of Bridget Riley. Sequencing of the form introduces movement into the painterly continuum, together with the idea of the interchangeability of pictures within the same triptych. The vividness of the colours heightens the contrast between form and counterform. While this ground/form interplay has always governed Mabille’s work, here it takes on a different dimension in the series of polyptychs in which each picture is seen as part of a whole, in a kind of infinite regression applied to his own formal and conceptual system. In C’est cadeau (It’s a Gift), the book published in tandem with this exhibition, the drawings and texts set up an interplay of variation and rhythm which itself interacts with the paintings. The big polyptych under the skylight — twelve pictures characterised by the coexistence of muted, almost acid-hued tones — testifies to Mabille’s enormous talent as a colourist, and can be seen as a simultaneous tribute to Matisse and Albers. > Saturday 17 February : François Chattot reads from C’est cadeau, a book of poems and drawings by Pierre Mabille, published by Editions Unes. > Saturday 10 March, Le Similiblic, live television broadcast directed by Sylvie Ruaulx (open to the public, advance booking preferred).