14 June-12 July 1986
To close the 85-86 season, Françoise Palluel presented three young artists, each of whom, in his or her own way, attempted to take up the challenge of abstract painting: to visualise one's own mental universe in a universal language. There was something risky in this willingness to put side by side three approaches so different at first sight. And yet "it worked". We were already familiar with the very fine work of Peter Valentiner who, with his series of paintings produced in 1985, proposes an original plastic universe. He plays with form and content as well as light and shadow, i.e. each painting is a juxtaposition of fragments of torn paintings, suspended in the void. There are spatial effects that usually belong to the collage or trompe-l'oeil technique. More gestural and expressive, the work of Bernard Cousinier, who was exhibiting here for the first time, belongs to this new family of young abstract artists who have understood and integrated the recent lesson in freedom given by free figuration.
Françoise Novarina, whose first Paris exhibition was also here, has a much more secret universe. The large geometric figures that make up the painting on only two or three planes subtly flush with the surface. The balance that exists between these figures is not only due to their arrangement. They all belong to the same common background of paint, worked in successive thin layers. Finally, between black and white, the passages to colour are done in pastel shades that give the whole a great luminosity.
Elisabeth Couturier
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