Galerie Eva Vautier is pleased to present the exhibition ‘Lollipop’ by Gregory Forstner (his second exhibition at the gallery, after La Fiancée du…
Galerie Eva Vautier is pleased to present the exhibition ‘Lollipop’ by Gregory Forstner (his second exhibition at the gallery, after La Fiancée du Collectionneur in 2015). Building on his exhibition at the FRAC Occitanie in Montpellier, and running alongside his retrospective at the Suquet des artistes in Cannes, we present here new works made since last year. During this particularly singular period that we have lived through collectively, Gregory Forstner found himself renewing his vocabulary. For the first time, he has set aside the figure, which had been present since the beginning of his career and his studies at the Villa Arson. The artist focuses on the motif of the bouquet, already shown in 2019 in ‘Flowers for the Bold’. For the past year he has been producing a body of nature mortes, or rather ‘still lifes’, which could be so many possible vanitas, reflections on this collective temporality. View of the exhibition Lollipo, Gregory Forstner, 2021, Galerie Eva Vautier Photo © François Fernandez ‘Lollipop’, beyond its most immediate evocation, is a scientific experiment conducted by Melvin Calvin and Andy Benson, aiming to light a culture of green algae with white light. In doing so, Calvin's group showed that sunlight acts on the chlorophyll in a plant to fuel the construction of organic compounds. As in the scientific experiment, there is in this body of painting and drawing something like an attempt to resort to elementary, primitive gestures: the experience of a regeneration out of ‘almost nothing’, whose only vehicle would be the need for life, desire and pleasure. The recourse to this elementary motif allows Gregory Forstner to activate an emotional charge held back until now in the real. Here, the notions of surface, verticality and horizontality, ergonomics, gravity, body and centrality – of physicality – are found as much in the account the artist gives of his experience of open-water swimming as in his experience of painting. LOLLIPOP(S). Emmanuel Latreille, Director of the Frac Occitanie Montpellier. “Like painting and the sea, which can be bad but never disappoint. Its eyes are my dogs. My property. I fear them like the wave that rises in the night, without a sound. Experience says one must dive beneath the foam. One must always dread a thing in order to grasp it well. The belly of the ocean between the teeth. When I swim, I no longer know whether it is water or air that I breathe. (...) At the top of the tongue, a lollipop stands tall. The lift is fragile.”1 Gregory Forstner During the summer of 2021, I invited Gregory Forstner for a solo exhibition at the Frac Occitanie Montpellier, the second in the Occitanie region2 since his return from the United States in 2018. After ten years spent in New York, the artist had chosen to settle in Montpellier, a “south of France” that is not the one he had left, since he was then living in Nice, where he had studied at the Villa Arson. It seemed legitimate to me to give him the…
