Recent works

On the occasion of the thirty-year collaboration between Galerie La Forest Divonne and artist Alexandre Hollan, an exceptional exhibition presents his latest works at the gallery on Rue des Beaux-Arts.

Alexandre Hollan is an artist who, for nearly sixty years, has spent four months each year in the Occitan countryside, near Montpellier. There, he works in the silence of a Cézanne-like landscape, patiently engaged with a motif that nourishes “his search,” as he puts it. Like any great body of work that has chosen its subject and continually returns to it, Alexandre Hollan deepens his meditation on the visible and perception through trees (which he considers old friends and has given names to), still lifes (which he calls “silent lives”), and – the most recent phase of his creation – “the radiance of light through color.” These three components of his work, with their variations and surprises, sustain a body of art with spiritual intensity, which was once thoughtfully analyzed by his poet friend Yves Bonnefoy. The learned holder of the poetry chair at the Collège de France already, twenty years ago, identified the keys to understanding this “presence” that inhabits Hollan’s works.
What, at the edge of the perceptible, pulses at the heart of reality?
What do we truly see when we look? These are the questions pondered by the charcoals and distemper paintings presented in the exhibition.

Thierry Grillet,
Curator, writer, and essayist

EVENT

Nocturne des Beaux-Arts — Thursday, December 5, 2024 — 7 PM
Meeting with Alexandre Hollan — “Reflecting on Hollan’s Trees” by Thierry Grillet