Bernard Pagès — Colonnes 1966 — 2025 — Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Ends in 25 days: October 21 → November 29, 2025

The gallery is pleased to present an exhibition dedicated to Bernard Pagès, a key figure of the Supports/Surfaces movement. Entitled Colonnes 1966 — 2025, it brings together recent works and historical sculptures, revealing how verticality runs through his entire practice and stands as one of its founding motifs.

Bernard Pagès began as a painter and draftsman before turning to sculpture, inspired by Brancusi. Through his encounters with artists from Supports/Surfaces, he took part in the group’s early exhibitions, whether in nature or, in 1969, in the streets of Coaraze, a village in the hills above Nice where he lived. Yet he quickly distanced himself, breaking away from the group as early as 1971, shortly before its dissolution.

From the late 1960s, after leaving Paris to settle in Coaraze, he developed a singular sculptural language born of the assembly of heterogeneous materials: wood, stone, earth, plaster, concrete, iron, string, brick… Pagès drew inspiration from the Works and Days he had known as a child on his family’s farm in the Lot. He reinterpreted them through his Assemblages, Arrangements and experiments of the 1970s, which paved the way for emblematic series that punctuate his œuvre.

With the Colonnes, Pagès embarked on one of his most significant cycles. As Brigitte Léal has written: “‘It was then that the splendid litany of the Colonnes (1979–1985) appeared’ (Christian Bernard). […] Pagès’s work, which had begun life at ground level and unframed, came to identify itself with the column. Paradoxically, the very emblem of classical order and measure resonated for the artist as an echo of L’Abri de jardin of 1970 (Centre Pompidou collection), which he considered ‘a matter of landscape, like in Poussin’s paintings, it could have been a little antique column.’ Already at that time emerged the idea of ‘a small basic unit that could expand’ and of its inscription within a site. Columns for modern man, his cities and his landscapes? The reference to Le Corbusier’s utopian principles (Pagès once visited the legendary cabanon at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, which he deemed ‘too sophisticated’) is inescapable for any Mediterranean artist. […]

After the catharsis of aesthetic materialism, his appetite for mass and matter led him to produce several series of totemic or reclining columns that resolved the antagonism between painting and sculpture, harmonious proportions and suffocating materiality. […]

Looking at these early series, one might be tempted to interpret them as postmodern replicas of Brancusi’s Endless Columns, based on the modular repetition of a rhomboid triggering an infinite upward movement. But whereas Brancusi favored light, supple woods, Pagès preferred heavy, stocky materials, raw or worked (stone, cement, concrete, marble, even palm), whose similar blocks are cut, stacked, and sealed one atop another in a steady rhythm. […]”

With the Colonnes, Bernard Pagès transformed verticality into a motif at once archaic and modern, rooted in matter yet open to the infinite. They embody the memory of the landscapes that shaped them as much as they invent new ways of inhabiting space.