{davide balula, jonathan binet, simon collet, blaise parmentier, guillaume pellay, elodie seguin}

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There is a desire these days to explore the contemporary practices of the “off-canvas,” understood both as off the frame (that is, something not openly shown but whose presence can be felt) and off the beaten track, away from well-charted territories.

Eluding its own definition (its essential definition, one could say: covering a surface with a color), painting becomes diffuse, indexical, contextual.

A painting exhibition may not feature any canvas on the wall. It may instead be a place where the spirit of painting blows, a space given over to young artists whose practices all belong to painting, more or less.”

That was the starting point. Written over a year ago, this statement submitted to the artists soon developed beyond its initial intent. Hours of discussion ensued, owing much to the fact that, this once at least, we had time on our side. We had the opportunity to use it to examine this situation of collective exhibition rather than rush into its production. The possibility of a common gesture then emerged. What is a collective exhibition when the artists brought together by the curator decide on a common gesture?

Considering the space as a single object sounded quite right, as did emphasizing one of its perspectives: revealing something already there, a trajectory, a look. What was the situation, if not a set of points of view on the same space? Carving out two original planes and giving them to see through a kind of pictorial counter-form, a sharp cut into something that would tend towards indetermination, was one possible answer to this situation. How do you paint so that painting is not what is being looked at? How do you choose a color almost by default, and then counter its pictoriality, blur it, thus using it to bring out this white space, this abstraction created from scratch, yet always already present? »