Visit of the exhibition every Wednesday at 6:45 pm (Registration required).
Exhibition from May 1st to June 4, 2023.

Melchior de Tinguy makes painting the very subject of his work. The building paint, fresh and polished, the lime paint loaded and decorative, the oil paint deep and Dutch, make up the varnish of the same whole: the decor of our lives. Through his practice, the artist brings back paint to its texture; a gelatinous liquid pouring into the world in culture. If a flat surface makes us believe by a succession of smooth and homogeneous layers that our streets are safe and that our gods exist, the thickness by impasto betrays the flat surface and breaks its illusion. Made of cumulative references, Melchior de Tinguy's work questions the history of matter as well as the history of materiality, and in so doing re-enacts the history of painting.

In this new series, each painting unfolds as an exercise as much as an attempt: to say the same thing every day, using a different language each time. Faced with the presupposed patience and coherence of artistic work, he develops a personal use of the everyday where impulse and improvisation are mixed. Transforming, frenetic, what falls to him under the hand, the artist reorganizes the real. He takes pleasure in chance and encounters, goes from studio to studio in order to seize from his peers falls and accidents. The artist ingests extruded Plexiglas, dried earth or wooden martyrdom and digests them into new pieces. Like fragments of practices, external elements and events condition the inner impulses. The works become open and elastic structures, which evolve according to the available resources and the given context. In Melchior's work, this principle of capillarity does not only invest the actuality of the present but also extends into the thickness of the past. Here, the vestiges of today are combined with the styles and movements of yesterday. From the bareness of Morandi to the plasticity of Rauschenberg, poor art and pop art complement and contradict each other. Like spaces of conversation, Melchior's works weave a web of physical, historical and memorial interconnections. To the sometimes cynical posture of postmodern pastiche, a genuine metamodern enthusiasm always prevails in his work.

In fact, the idea seems less for the artist to mobilize a collective "we" than to link it to an authentic and personal "we", under which a constellation of selves, a parliament of artists, is agitated.

Text by curator Raphaël Giannesini