After bringing together 30 artists in the end-of-year exhibition, the Galerie Eva Vautier has decided to present, for this first exhibition of 2026, an…
After bringing together 30 artists in the end-of-year exhibition, the Galerie Eva Vautier has decided to present, for this first exhibition of 2026, an intimate dialogue. Two gazes, two generations. On one side, Gérald Panighi; on the other, Clémentine Taupin. Gérald Panighi graduated from the Villa Arson in 2001. From Gérald Panighi’s practice, we keep in mind these drawings in large “raisin” format, in which the artist transfers, at their centre and by means of tracing paper, fragments of illustrations drawn from popular culture and the mass media. Faced with this partly identifiable vocabulary, the artist refrains from applying his own touch and deliberately limits his intervention to stylistic effects: redundancy, reversal, reframing, opposition, superimposition. The drawing levitates, in silence, circumscribed within the empty space, stained by the intimate; the artist’s presence creeps in through spots and smudges, whether intentional or not. They are due to the media used, residues of wet paint, the grease of graphite pencil accumulated on the side of the hand during the transfer operation, returning to haunt the paper. Clémentine Taupin was born in 2001, the same year Gérald Panighi graduated from the Villa Arson, a school she also attended. She graduated from it in 2024. Daughter and granddaughter of farmers, she carries within her the urgency of a family farm seeking a successor. Although she has not taken up working the land, painting has taken over. Her works bear witness to an intergenerational transmission of ancestral gestures, confronted with contemporary agriculture. Her dissonant palette – acid greens, pastel flesh tones, fluorescent stains – thinks of rurality as a departure from clichés. Violet tones, fed by the light of screens, express the contamination of the digital gaze on rural memory. Her supports call on another peasant generation. She mends, patches and reuses fabrics handed down from a maternal inheritance. Patched by their hands and then by hers, these textiles become charged surfaces. The artist is currently a resident at La Station. © Clémentine Taupin, Percheron, 2025 © Gérald Panighi, 2025 Watch the video
