Stand J2 Gregory ForstnerTom BarbagliAnne-Laure WuillaiFlorian Pugnaire For the 2024 edition of Art Paris, Eva Vautier presents a selection of four French…
Stand J2 Gregory ForstnerTom BarbagliAnne-Laure WuillaiFlorian Pugnaire For the 2024 edition of Art Paris, Eva Vautier presents a selection of four French artists with a clear focus on volumes, while continuing to follow an essential artist for contemporary painting – Gregory Forstner, whose dog figures, drawn from an imaginary, giant tarot, show his delirious and virtuoso gaze on the old masters of painting in a monumental format. The arcana of this game, where human and animal meet, serve as an introduction to the forms present in this space, at once reassuring and unsettling: At the heart of Anne-Laure Wuillai’s practice is our human relationship to the natural environment: using samples of seawater, grains of sand, stones, algae and many other organic elements, she recomposes biotopes for a nature packaged in boxes, echoing the elements of Tom Barbagli, who develops micro-universes in which the mechanics of forces and the quest for movement operate in strikingly lapidary and imposing works. This impression of contemporary totems in tension, where the pagan and the sacred meet, is also present in the work of Florian Pugnaire. Made of strapped sheet metal and crumpled metals, his pieces play with the codes of sculpture and respond to a hybridisation in which natural light settles on synthetic materials. These works are visual and conceptual games, and the culmination of a commentary on our world and on the ambiguous relationship we maintain with a certain blurring of boundaries and of our reference points: where nature becomes synthetic and the synthetic becomes natural. Camille Frasca, art historian Gregory Forstner A graduate of the Villa Arson (Nice) in 1999, Gregory Forstner’s painting is among those reputed to be “disturbing”. His canvases often echo the history of art, classical or modern, and seem to embrace a distance from the formalist practices of the French and European scene. Of Austrian origin, Forstner often refers to Expressionist painting practices (Otto Dix, Richard Gerstl...), whose place in a bygone history of art is self-evident to many. Photo: Gregory Forstner, King of Hearts (2), 2023 Oil on linen, 130 x 89 cm. Learn more Tom Barbagli Tom Barbagli explores the affinities and fractures between the worlds of design and art, campaigning for the erasure of their edges and limits. He engages in singular experiments, bending the laws of physics with utilitarian materials (motors, light-emitting diodes, hard drives) as much as with natural matter (beeswax, solid wood, minerals). The ingenuity of the mechanical assemblies then creates dreamlike objects or immersive installations, akin to micro-phenomena. Photo: Tom Barbagli, Inspiration , 2021, EPDM rubber, metal, vacuum 100 x 100 x 30 cm. Learn more Anne-Laure Wuillai A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2014, Anne-Laure Wuillai, facing the sea, draws up an inventory of samples, among which waters, sediments and shorelines are meticulously…
