Valentine Prissette's old sheets dyed in pastel colors, Victor Pueyo's hanging still lifes and Maxime Testu's rusty paintings all wait wisely, as if each one had been forgotten, left there, just long enough to...

Together, they draw a house where the roughcast cracks, where knick-knacks are discreetly scattered in every nook and cranny, where the summer heat has a peppery smell. This mended house could be the one Marcel Pagnol describes in his Souvenirs d'enfance, “The house was called La Bastide-Neuve, but it had been new for a long time. It was an old farmhouse in ruins, restored thirty years earlier by a gentleman from the city who sold tent covers, floor cloths and brooms”. (Marcel Pagnol, La Gloire de mon père, De Fallois Fortunio, 2004 (published in 1957), p. 99).

Maxime Testu's diluted pigments, like snatches of summer memories that gradually come back to mind, allow the layers of paint to fade away and overlap, gradually revealing a house or a field. The fluidity of the paint forces the forms to flatten out, leaving the browned, scorched hues of the canvas to evoke faded, distant landscapes, as if the hidden indication in Valentine Prissette's panel had played the role of didascalia.

It has been stained, almost enough, or at least a long time ago. Valentine Prissette accommodates these fabrics on wooden supports, arranging the discreet details of family trousseau numbers, whose openwork lines soon evoke windows. She borrows patterns from the objects, isolates them, dyes them, molds them and mends them. Their early lives are only hinted at, and we can't wait to find out what they might have been.

While Valentine Prissette's sun-bleached sheets are stretched on their frames, Victor Pueyo's oils on cigarette paper are laid out like linen drying on the thread of Pagnol's fig garden. The balance is fragile. The apples and carafes share some of their contours, helping to keep the paper table from wobbling as it folds up. On the horizon, everything waits patiently. You can almost hear the knick-knacks tinkling.

On a long-new footbridge, there's just enough time to stop. “Then began the happiest days of my life. The house was called La Bastide-Neuve, but it had been new for a long time."

-Jeanne de La Masselière

With Valentine Prissette, Victor Pueyo, Maxime Testu

Curator : Jeanne de La Masselière

Saturday 5 April, 2025