The Armory Show 2026
24 Sep - 27 Sep 2026
Fairs
The Raw and the Radiant: Radical French Landscape Painting
Galerie La Forest Divonne (Paris/Brussels) disrupts traditional pastoral narratives at The Armory Show 2026 with a powerful, physical exploration of nature through the lens of four generation-defining French painters: Vincent Bioulès, Ronan Barrot, Patrice Giorda, and Guy de Malherbe.
Moving far beyond decorative tradition, this curation repositions contemporary French painting as a vehicle for raw emotion, geological force, and existential weight. Anchored by heavy institutional recognition, the booth operates on a captivating aesthetic tension: the visceral clash between the raw and the radiant.
On the raw side, Ronan Barrot—whose powerful style recently led to a celebrated dialogue with Claude Monet at Maison Caillebotte and a retrospective at the Musée Courbet—unleashes dense, tempestuous impastos that collide with Patrice Giorda’s tormented, deeply expressionistic visions of nature, celebrated early on at MoMa’s 1986 exhibition « Eight French Painters ».
Responding with the radiant, Guy de Malherbe—backed by a major new monograph by international art publisher Skira—dissects the mineral architecture of cliffs with near-abstract, sculptural brushstrokes. Finally, legendary master Vincent Bioulès, a historic co-founder of the Supports-Surfaces movement whose major works are enshrined in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou (Musée National d’Art Moderne), captures the vibrating, absolute light of the Mediterranean through flat, radiant planes of pure color.
Together, these four distinct voices bridge generations to prove that the landscape is a living, breathing battleground of light and matter. By bringing this intense, material-driven dialogue to New York, Galerie La Forest Divonne offers a timely masterclass in the physical renaissance of European painting. This is nature redefined as pure energy.
Jean de Malherbe
