Coming from a background of poets and intellectuals, Anna Mark studied painting at the Budapest School of Fine Arts, then worked as a stage designer. She left Hungary in 1956. After staying in Saarbrücken, she moved to Paris in 1959, where she lives and works today. After painting with oil, she became interested in other techniques: engraving, pen drawing, relief of marble powder, pastel, gouache. She creates abstract works, marked by architectural construction. Anna Mark’s gouaches follow a double evolution over the years: in forms and colors which have evolved from black to earthy colors, and to luminous reds (gouaches first called Rouges de Pompéi). In these latest works, the architectural geometry reveals a fantasy of nuances that fit together, collide, combine, merge. The light vibrations participate in this mysterious alchemy that radiates, illuminates the space up to us.
After graduating from the DEFA d’Architecture in 1996 and the École des Gobelins in Paris in 1998, Jérôme Bryon quickly became a still-life photographer for a number of magazines, and produced his first personal series. Influenced by both architecture and Russian constructivism, Bryon is initially haunted by images with structured lines. From his earliest series, he established a photographic camera work style, concentrating on detail and its abundance, to the point of creating images where the viewer loses himself in a fragmented “all over”.
Already in the 98% series of 2004, the foundations of his work have been laid. Far from conceptual or performative considerations, Jérôme Bryon uses protocols to “take the time to see better”. Over a period of three years, he undertook ten one-week sojourns in the Alps, with the aim of rediscovering the essence of the satisfaction felt when facing the mountains. He composes with what he calls “the density of matter”. With a more constructivist approach, Jérôme Bryon wrests his everyday, anodyne “sculptures” from reality, isolating them to better reveal their structural potential, their abstract reality.
In the series that followed, Posture, Windows, Sous-Œuvre and Grand Sud, the composition of the image asserts itself and the abstract constructions are confirmed. Photographing hotel rooms costing less than €40, house interiors, building sites and shopping malls, Bryon observes and transforms form into subject, turning the banal into the exceptional.
With the Sous-Paysages serie dating from 2024, Jérôme Bryon returns to the immensity of the mountains and once again turns his attention to raw material, playing with lines and scales, making the invisible visible.
Finally, isn’t detail the main subject of Jérôme Bryon’s work? Saturday April 12 4pm – 7pm in the presence of the artists
Bernadette Chéné was born in 1947, she lives and works in France.
Drawing on the heritage of Minimalism and Arte Povera, Bernadette Chéné uses simple materials to exploit their formidable plastic qualities. She resolutely keeps ornament at a distance to encourage listening and subtle perception. Bernadette Chéné cultivates simplicity not only in her materials, but also in her forms: she uses primary geometry, circles, triangles, columns and pyramids to reveal the essence of things. She is regularly invited by museums and art centres to create monumental installations based on the same principle. Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections.
“Bernadette Chéné delights in the transformation of sculpture brought about by the avant-gardes of the second half of the twentieth century, deliberately following in their footsteps. From Minimal Art she takes the modular element and the serial principle, from Arte Povera her attention to the dialectic between nature and culture, from the Supports/Surfaces movement her desire to test the mechanisms of sculpture, from Process Art her desire to efface herself in favour of the material”. Gaëlle Rageot-Deshayes, Heritage Curator.
Art3 has recently published the artist’s first comprehensive monograph, which you can buy in our Eshop
Jeff Kowatch, born in California in 1965, moved to Belgium in 2002 after working in New York for about ten years. He developed a colourist painting marked by the great American abstracts, from Mark Rothko to Brice Marden and, for the technique, by the great Flemish painters, Rembrandt in particular, whose recipes for linseed oil he has reclaimed, which give his painting a particular effect of depth and transparency, typical of the northern glazes.
Recently, Kowatch has developed a body of work using the oil stick technique on Dibond (an aluminum panel). These works catch the eye through the use of bold shapes and incredibly luminous colors, layered one over another. Thanks to this technique, the oil is concentrated in a single stick, allowing the use of oil paint in a dry form while preserving the intensity of the pigments.
“Jeff Kowatch testifies to a research as demanding as it is original: that of world music. Sometimes thundering and fierce; sometimes delicate in its polyphonies. A world of light that evokes both the late Monet and his magical water lilies and the mystical Rothko who unravels in his pure fields of colours the diversity of a world dedicated to the spiritual alone. Between the jubilant assumption of the luxuriant pastels and the calm meditation of the large paintings where the forms find their balance, the same breath passes. »
Michel Draguet, Director General of the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, excerpt from the text “Plénitude et mascarade colorées”, published in the “Jeff Kowatch Full Circle” 2018 catalog. In May 2024, the prestigious Skira publishing house will publish a major monograph retracing the artist’s career from the outset. And in summer 2024, La Boverie (Liège), highlights Kowatch’s work in its “Abstract” exhibition as one of the major artists of contemporary abstraction.
Born in 1977 in Hungary, Illés Sarkantyu lives and works in France.
The issues of absence and presence, memory and heritage feed Illés Sarkantyu’s work, which is distinguished by its precision, its mastery of light and technique. However, sophistication is not the goal. This precise use of photography no longer makes it a means of reproduction, but a tool for amplified access to the world.
As an investigator, historian, archaeologist, or simple witness, Illés Sarkantyu exhumes images and traces of history that he revisits through his photographs. His images function as clues to reconstitute a narrative or a given moment as if to compensate for the deficit of memories.
lllés Sarkantyu does not like art for art’s sake but for the sake of awakening. Yes, to use a famous expression, “art is what makes life more interesting than art”, because the concern for the world develops.
Pierre Wat
NEWS
Born in 1973. Lives and works in Paris.
Arthur Aillaud’s work proceeds by juxtapositions: a monochrome geometric zone on a landscape. Each space is a cutting surface of another surface. This reframing at work in the paintings builds rather a decadrage, it allows a critical distance on the subject. The representation is questioned. The architectural organization of the elements of figuration and non-figuration, in a relationship of strict pictorial equality and for compositional purposes, tends to invert, even to blur, our codes of reading. The precarious balance that is established between wall spaces and points of view, in the depth of field, of natural or urban landscapes, reveals all the fragility of reality. The painting becomes its own decor where the trompe l’oeil is no longer an artifice but the main organ of an internal rhythm in the painting. Concrete sets the tone and makes the panoramas resonate. The artist thus plays the plant, or the mineral, against the architectural … all against.
