Since 1989, Jacqueline Gainon has regularly exhibited her painting in France and abroad.
Since 1989, Jacqueline Gainon has regularly exhibited her painting in France and abroad. Her works are held in numerous private and public collections, notably those of the Musée Picasso in Antibes and the MAMAC (Nice), as well as museums in Cannes, Dunkirk, Toulon and Nantes. Jacqueline Gainon’s works invite the viewer into an intimate experience, where personal memories and collective myths intersect, evoking echoes of our lost paradises and our hells. The absence of explicit narrative in the artist’s painting opens the way to an emotional resonance that transcends formalism. Her art, resolutely introspective, weaves links between past and present, quietude and fall, light and darkness. In 1987, during an exhibition at Joachim Becker’s, the critic Jacques Lepage wrote: « Jacqueline Gainon agrees to be a painter, to appear traditional; she does not theorise, she paints, and what she paints becomes painting. The violence of a world in the grip of fury, the anguish of the moment when man discovers he is destructible in his very essence… » In this new exhibition, Jacqueline Gainon explores the way in which the repetition of forms and motifs influences aesthetic perception. Here, the meaning of the work fades in favour of pure aesthetics, which becomes a real subject of exploration. Repetition, far from being a mere exercise in redundancy, reveals itself as a visual force. The motif unfolds endlessly, and each variation reveals a new detail, a flash of light or a subtlety, which makes each canvas unique. For the artist, the quest for beauty takes precedence over meaning, offering the viewer a purely sensory experience. Through this exhibition, Jacqueline Gainon wishes to invite the public to reconsider their relationship to art, raising an essential question: can beauty suffice in itself, in a world where we constantly seek to give meaning? Or is it precisely in the contemplation of beauty that we discover a new space for reflection? On the occasion of the OVNi festival (Objectif Vidéo Nice) 2024, we will present, upstairs at the gallery, the film Sans titre (2011) by Natacha Lesueur, taken from her series Carmen Miranda. Natacha Lesueur invents unprecedented images. Their singularity lies in the strangeness that inhabits them. The faces and bodies she depicts are almost always those of female models. Through various processes, she subverts her characters and portraits by introducing chimeras. Their plastic force places them at the confluence of painting, sculpture and performance. Since 2009, Natacha Lesueur has been producing staged photographs using a model to re-enact the character of Carmen Miranda. This Portuguese-Brazilian actress and dancer was particularly famous in the United States in the 1940s, when she starred in some fifteen box-office hits. Carmen Miranda embodied a certain exoticism: wearing hats adorned with fruit, dressed in extravagant samba costumes, displaying an exuberant sensuality. Her character blended South American…
