Statut: Represented

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Group show – La Nature n’est pas un décor – de Monet aux artistes contemporains, Maison Caillebotte, Yerres, France – From 08/05/2026 to 18/10/2026

Ronan Barrot, born in 1973, is a painter. He entered the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1991, graduating with honors in 1997. In 2001, Galerie Trafic organized his first solo exhibition, Cataractes. In 2006, he exhibited his paintings at the Musée Marc Chagall in Nice. From 2007, he is represented by Galerie Claude Bernard. It devotes numerous group and solo exhibitions to his work, and presents him at numerous events (FIAC, BRAFA, ArtParis) as well as in other galleries. Many of his works are already part of major private collections in France and abroad, and today feature in those of national museums: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de la Ville de Strasbourg, Fondation MAEGHT in Saint Paul de Vence, FRAC Île-de-France-Le Plateau, FRAC Auvergne, etc.

Ronan Barrot acknowledges a number of profound influences: among his masters are Goya and Courbet, from whom he derives his material, his light, his play with reinvented color and his passion for contrasting dark and light hues. At once a portraitist, a landscape painter and a painter of vanities, sometimes nostalgic, always visionary, sometimes an illusionist, he masters all genres, interweaving them with bravado but always with accuracy.

Galerie La Forest Divonne is delighted to present Ronan Barrot for the first time at the BRAFA Art Fair.

Born in Hungary in 1933, Alexandre Hollan moved to Paris in 1956. For more than fifty years he has developed a very profound body of work which he calls his “Research”. A search for the invisible vibration of trees and things: reaching the limits of the “visible” to touch the true nature of what he is looking at. This major oeuvre has developped through two subjects tirelessly taken up: trees on the one hand, still lifes on the other one, which he calls “Silent Lives”. Alexandre

Hollan’s dialogue with many poets such as Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Ancet, Philippe Jacottet or Claude Louis-Combet resulted in more than 40 publications of art books and artists. Many European museums have exhibited his works and acquired them for their collections (Centre Pompidou, Musée Fabre, Fine Arts Museum of Hungary, Planque Collection, Kunsthaus Zürich…).

Samuel Yal has exhibited in France, Spain, Italy and Belgium. Resident at Casa Velasquez in Madrid from 2015 to 2016, he was awarded the Prix de sculpture by the Institut de France in 2016 and the Grand Prix de l’Institut Bernard Magrez in 2017. He has exhibited at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Musée Dobrée, Fontevraud Abbey and the Boghossian Foundation. His monumental work Prologue opened the exhibition Aux Frontières de l’Humain at the Musée de l’Homme (Paris) in 2021.

Yal’s work is often fragmentary. Bodies and faces are mishandled, caught in the throes of profound change. Some pieces simply feature a mass of coral and lichen, here an ear, there the tip of a breast: Samuel Yal says that this is what you would find inside one of his sculptures if you broke it. Remnants of a past life or the first elements, the matrices, of another, in the process of being recomposed? Sometimes – as if we were looking at a freeze-frame of an explosion – a tide of these little pieces of life, both human and vegetable, emerges from a face. Over there, charred heads escape and dissolve into the sky. Further on, a broken head is glued back together with gold leaf, like broken Japanese ceramics whose restoration does not seek to hide the crack but, on the contrary, to magnify it.

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Ce que vaut une femme – Les 12 heures du jour et de la nuit, from the 12th of November to the 20th of December 2025, Centre National de Bretagne, Rennes, France 

Lost and found, from the 6th of June to the 27th of November 2025 at Marseille’s Photography center

Les douze heures du jour et de la nuit, from the 17th of May to the 2nd of November 2025 at the Castle of Haroué, France

Winners of the Grand Paris Express «Tandem» programme for the creation of a permanent work in one of the future metro stations in collaboration with architect Thomas Richez, under the direction of José-Manuel Gonçalvès.

Palace Odyssée exhibition on the platforms of the Champs-Élysées Clemenceau metro station, Paris. Until 2025, during the renovation of the Palais de la découverte.
Winners for the creation of two artistic posters for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

 

Elsa Parra (born 1990) and Johanna Benaïnous (born 1991) have been collaborating since 2014 under the name of the duo Elsa & Johanna.

Working at the crossroads of photography, performance and video, they have been creating visual narratives since their meeting, of which they are the interpreters. The use of autofiction, at the heart of Elsa & Johanna’s work, allows them to stage characters freed from their own identity, questioning the contemporary individual, the notions of self-representation and anonymity.

Their work has been exhibited at the Salon de Montrouge (2016), the MAC/VAL, Paris Photo and the Festival d’Hyères (2019). In 2020, they are finalists for the Prix Découverte Louis Roederer at the Rencontres d’Arles, they are part of the Société Générale Contemporary Art Collection, they are commissioned by the Palais de la Découverte and they are part of the exhibition “Staging Identity” at the MathildenhöheInstitut in Darmstadt alongside Pipilotti Rist and Cindy Shermann.
Their photographs are part of the collections of the CNAP, the Fond d’Acquisition d’Art Contemporain de la ville de Paris and the Société Générale, among others.

In 2021, the artists hold their first retrospective exhibition entitled “The plural life of identity” at the Städtische Galerie in Karlsruhe, Germany.
In 2022 Elsa & Johanna open the Season at the MEP Studio in Paris with an exhibition dedicated to their latest project The Timeless Story of Moormerland, produced in Germany.

NEWS

Clepsydres, Esprit de vin, exposition personnelle, Galerie La Forest Divonne, Paris, June 10 – July 11 2026

Participation au Ooidonck Art Festival (Belgium) – from 18/06/2026 to 30/08/2026

 

Jean-Bernard Metais’ artistic development has been marked by recurring themes from the 1980s to the present day: the fixed and the random, and the fragility of time. Depending on the specific needs of each project, he explores and experiments with the materials best suited to his project. Stainless steel, bronze, aluminum, glass and wood are all part of his medium, as are sand, wind and light.

“What drives Jean Bernard Métais’ research is the invention of objects with the ability to incorporate energies into their work, enabling us to visualize the incessant metamorphoses of things. For example, in the mirror of an immense hourglass, the reverse side of the plane shows the sand in motion, acting on its shape and, as it is exhausted, carving out rhymes, a kind of counter-form, as if the disintegration of the volume, as it is accomplished, were revealing a pentacle whose geometry would be the spell. The gaze is then held, fascinated by the spectacle of the simultaneous transformations of the sand, which by changing planes liquefies, builds pyramids or writes words according to a necessity carefully calculated by the artist. Of course, without the need for the mind to formulate it, the sand speaks of time, collecting geological events, animal and plant life, of which the arena is merely the repository, before its grains come together once again and, through this concatenation, begin a new cycle that belies the title the artist gives to these imparted times, since each of them precisely decloses the circle of time.”

“What drives Jean Bernard Métais’ research is the invention of objects with the ability to incorporate energies into their work, enabling us to visualize the incessant metamorphoses of things. For example, in the mirror of an immense hourglass, the reverse side of the plane shows the sand in motion, acting on its shape and, as it is exhausted, carving out rhymes, a kind of counter-form, as if the disintegration of the volume, as it is accomplished, were revealing a pentacle whose geometry would be the spell. The gaze is then held, fascinated by the spectacle of the simultaneous transformations of the sand, which by changing planes liquefies, builds pyramids or writes words according to a necessity carefully calculated by the artist. Of course, without the need for the mind to formulate it, the sand speaks of time, collecting geological events, animal and plant life, of which the arena is merely the repository, before its grains come together once again and, through this concatenation, begin a new cycle that belies the title the artist gives to these imparted times, since each of them precisely decloses the circle of time.”

Text by Jean de Loisy (extract from “Les chambres sensorielle de Jean-Bernard Métais”)

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Le Choc de la couleur, September 2026, Galerie La Forest Divonne Brussels

Art Brussels 2026, from Thursday 23 April to Sunday 26 April 2026.

Born in 1938, Vincent Bioulès lives and works in Montpellier.

With Jean-Pierre Pincemin and Claude Viallat among others, Vincent Bioulès is one of the founders of the Support/Surface group, one of the last movements of the French avant-garde, effective in the early 1970s.

During this period, he worked on chromaticism in juxtaposed vertical bands obtained thanks to an adhesive roller, where the work emancipated itself from any narrative content. His paintings show a great rigour of construction and a work of the material, alternately smooth and light or thick and applied in an apparent touch. The mid-1970s was a pivotal period in the artist’s career, as he abandoned abstraction for figuration. Far from being a break, this change is an evolution, a transposition of abstract lessons into the motif.

The panoramas he represents come from mnemonic images, captured several times, at several times of the day, then recomposed in the workshop. He explores colour and light in frontal compositions, cut-out, synthetic forms, inventing a new complexity. His works testify to “what is irreplaceable at the moment” in a research that reflects his passage through abstraction: “What I do today could not have existed without the previous experience of abstraction”.