Galerie Simoncini - - Page 2

exhibition in progress

Stéphane Erouane Dumas

from February 7 to March 22, 2025

Stéphane Érouane Dumas has been exhibiting in our gallery for 20 years and each exhibition he presents is a new great emotion.
It is an understatement to say that the artist's gaze on his great Normandy cliffs and the birch forests of Lapland is one of those that fascinates.

A sublime encounter between a man and the surrounding universe, whose breathing he makes us hear as much as he helps us to decipher its shapes and colors that change over time and the four seasons.
Spring lights and lichens like a winter coat for the great trees of a mysterious world that he helps us to penetrate.

His new works, paintings on canvas and paper and sculptures that the artist has been apprehending for almost ten years, bear witness to the demanding quest he is engaged in.
Always on the path, always listening to a nature that allows him to tell the world through minerals and plants, he puts and puts the work back on the loom, maturing, deepening his perception, visual perception and sensitive perception, constantly examining the landscapes of his Normandy and opening up to new territories.

His presence in our gallery remains forever marked for us by his beautiful meeting with Anise Koltz in 2013 during the release of « Pomme », a little fairy tale that entered our editions, which he had accompanied with all his talent and generosity, leaving the great white verticalities to sow fruits along the path of the little lunar character.

A.S.

Stéphane Erouane Dumas
exhibition Stéphane Erouane Dumas 2025

exhibition in futur

GAO XINGJIAN - Encres et MIKIO WATANABE - Gravures

du 28 mars au 10 mai 2025

Gao Xingjian

Writer, 2000 Nobel Prize winner for literature, playwright, stage and film director, Gao Xingjian is also an accomplished painter, whose works are on display in the gallery for the fourth time.

Today, this exceptional artist offers us the opportunity to discover a significant collection of Indian ink on paper, landscapes that take us on a journey through space and time "to the depths of the soul", as he himself likes to say. Somewhere between figurative and abstract, elements of Chinese tradition and his very personal approach to modern painting can be found. Figures and shadows interact in dazzling chiaroscuro, in landscapes that are "hazy and dreamlike, playing with all the tones of Indian ink, black on a white background and enriched with all the subtleties of grey" (Chantal Colleu-Dumond, former director of the Domaine de Château sur-Loire)

Some years ago, Gao Xingjian entrusted us with the manuscript "Deuil de la beauté", a long and beautiful poem and reflection on our times, and on a world where the sense of beauty and art has disappeared. The same poetry can be found in the artist's more recent works. Ink made with a variety of brushes, some very fine, others thick, others very hard and very pointed, on traditional handmade paper, rice, wheat or cotton paper mainly from Japan, Korea or Taiwan.

Biography

Born in 1940 in Ganzhou in eastern China, Gao Xingjian moved to France and became a French citizen in 1998. He was a young professor at Peking University when the Cultural Revolution of 1966 swept through the country. He was condemned to 6 years in a re-education camp. Gao Xingjian was critical of China's political development. His position remains unchanged. His freedom of thought, his theories and his avant-gardism went against the regime's way of thinking and his work was censored. He had to flee his country after the events of Tiananmen Square. He travelled, immersed himself in the masterpieces of Western art, swapped oil for ink, enriching and enhancing it. His work is now revered across the world.

Gao Xingjian

Mikio Watanabe

Inspired by nature, Japanese artist Mikio Watanabe is a new arrival in the gallery, where he showcases a beautiful collection of intaglio engravings.

Having learnt his craft from the great Stanley William Hayter, he mastered the highly demanding manière noire (black method) technique over the years, which today allows him to create deep, velvety blacks and subtle plays of light.

Born in Yokohama, Japan, the artist settled in France after studying art in Tokyo, and now works between Brittany and Paris. He very quickly found inspiration in the Breton countryside for his work on landscapes and flora, capturing fleeting moments in nature in black and white, in half-tones, with the shapes and structures.

Leaning over the paper, an old Gampi-type washi, "armed" with small hand-forged cradles, scrapers and burnishers, the artist captivates with his virtuosity and creativity, the lightness and fluidity, between shadow and light, of a work characterised by balance, serenity and harmony.

Mikio Watanabe

story

For 40 years, I have been running this art venue, which now coexists with a hotel, and offers its guests the chance to discover the works of art displayed throughout the building.

All you have to do is let yourself be guided from one universe to another through the engravings, paintings, sculptures and also the pages of books in our bibliophile edition to meet great artists from every continent.

Our collection is both a return to the older times that presided over the birth of our gallery with visual artists and authors who are today making some of the great pages in the history of art and literature, and a forward-looking desire to discover new talents.

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