Attempt the impossible

Galerie La Forest Divonne is pleased to present a new personal exhibition of recent paintings by Alain Veinstein, curated by Olivier Kaeppelin.

An essential figure in France Culture, writer and consecrated poet, Alain Veinstein is also a painter. When he left Radio France in 2014, he plunged back into painting, his first vocation. He exhibited for the first time at the Galerie La Forest Divonne in 2017, then
in Aix en Provence, Arles, Marseille…

Attempt the impossible is the third solo exhibition that Galerie La Forest Divonne has devoted to Alain Veinstein in Paris. In the world he paints, between figuration and abstraction, color becomes the subject. A great man of interviews, he brings forms and landscapes into dialogue in an imaginary populated by allusions and enigmas. The exhibition presents acrylics on canvas and pastels on paper in bright colors and sometimes animal or almost human shapes.

To evoke his search for a painter, Veinstein quotes the poet Etty Hillesum who writes in Une vie bouleversée: “You have to start from the space left to you, however limited it may be, immediately consider all your possibilities and make them a modest reality. These words perfectly echo the formal result of Alain Veinstein’s works, but also the difficult period he has been going through in recent years marked by illness. Hence the title “Trying the impossible”, and this is how he again “faced painting” for our greatest happiness.

ATTEMPT THE IMPOSSIBLE
A disease that I had never heard of before emptied my head and cut off my hands for many months. My chair has never been so happy: we never left each other all day. I thought painting was over for me. I had abandoned it for the first time forty years ago, but this time everything led me to think that it would be the right one. However, over time, I was torn between the desire to continue, to move forward, and the awareness of my condition which unfortunately did not allow me to hope. As proof, the order that was made to me for a series of some black and white canvases. It did not work. I no longer had control. I had to face the facts, the painting, for me, was well and truly finished. I just had to cross my arms in my chair. Fortunately, as if nothing had happened, desire ended up taking over. With one requirement: to try the impossible. That I don’t try to continue as before but that I try to face painting as if it were the first time. This is how I got into pastels. And the two hundred resulting drawings have restarted the machine. Paintings, of different formats succeeded them, which interpret in my way the principle of reality and found, like me, colors. I hope some of them will surprise you as they surprised me.
Alain Veinstein, May 2023