Solo show
Opening
Thursday 14 November 2024
To mark the 30th anniversary of Galerie La Forest de Divonne’s collaboration with the artist Alexandre Hollan, an exceptional exhibition presents his latest works.
Alexandre Hollan is an artist who, for almost sixty years, has spent four months a year in the Occitan countryside near Montpellier. Here, he works in the silence of a Cezannian landscape, in the patience of a motif that nourishes
“his research”, as he puts it. Like all great works that have chosen their subject and return to it again and again, Alexandre Hollan deepens his meditation on the visible and perception through trees (which he visits like old friends, and to which he has given names), still lifes (which he calls “silent lives”), and – the most recent stage in his creation – “rays of light through color”. These three components of his work, with their variations and surprises, underpin an oeuvre of spiritual intensity, once commented on by poet and friend Yves Bonnefoy. Twenty years ago, Bonnefoy, who holds the Chair of Poetry at the Collège de France, had already identified the keys to understanding the “presence” that inhabits Hollan’s work.
What is it that, at the limits of the perceptible, pulsates in the depths of reality?
What do we see when we look? The charcoals, oils and distempers presented in this exhibition brood over these thoughts.
Thierry Grillet,
Writer and essayist
