CONsTELLATIONSNew solo exhibition
A few days after completing my intervention in Giverny for the centenary of Claude Monet, I am opening a solo exhibition at the Magda Danysz Gallery. The timing is no coincidence: just as the mural has disappeared, while the public event is still fresh in people's minds, I want to open another door—one that leads into the studio, into the realm of slow time and enduring works.
For more than ten years, I have been creating monumental frescoes on grass, sand, snow, and earth using a biodegradable paint made from water, chalk, wood charcoal, and milk proteins. Visible only from the sky, these works are destined to disappear. Within a few weeks, they gradually fade away, reclaimed by rain, wind, tides, and the regrowth of vegetation. This deliberate disappearance raises a fundamental question: how should we think about a work of art that is conceived to vanish? What remains once its physical presence has dissolved?
This question runs through several strands of recent art history, and it is at their intersection that I locate my practice: the lineage of Land Art and landscape-based work, from Richard Long to Giuseppe Penone; that of material memory and the palimpsest, from Anselm Kiefer and Christian Boltanski to William Kentridge; and that of the imprint and the cosmological imagination inherited from Yves Klein.
From these ephemeral interventions, I preserve traces that I transform into works in their own right: graphite drawings and anamorphoses, which serve as matrices for the frescoes yet to come; aerial photographs accompanied by the tools and instruments used on site—survey stakes, gridded sketches, colour charts—now functioning as relics of a vanished gesture; and fragments of paper laid on the ground during the making of the work, resembling the individual pixels that together compose a larger image.
With this exhibition, a new gesture emerges: recomposition. Continuing a practice that seeks to capture the fleeting moment as closely as possible—to hold it suspended between presence and disappearance—I assemble constellations composed of canvases painted on site during the creation of the fresco alongside a photographic fragment of the work *in situ*. Stretched in the immediate vicinity of the site, these canvases experience the event in parallel, exposed to the same biodegradable paint, the same wind, and the same rain.
If the fresco is revealed from the sky, these new canvases present the work from beside it: at human height, on the scale of the painter in motion. Each constellation forms a unique ensemble, resonating with the memory of a specific fresco—an embodied archive at the intersection of Land Art and painting.
This exhibition marks the first presentation of this body of work as a whole. In the basement, I recreate my studio—sketches, tools, palettes, references, and the material traces still fresh from the Giverny project. It is the place from which everything begins, presented as it is, without staging or embellishment. Upstairs, the body of work unfolds: one wall is devoted to a human chain of ten graphite drawings, each hand bearing the story of an encounter made in the field; another presents three oil paintings, slow monuments to what the frescoes can express only fleetingly; a single constellation offers a unique recomposition of a vanished fresco; and surrounding it, the full constellation of related works—pixel fragments from several projects, pieces combining aerial photography with the tools of the working process, and *Buées*, which transpose the trace onto an intimate scale.
What I have been pursuing from the outset is the transformation of a work that disappears into a memory that endures—through other means, in other materials, and at other scales. The biodegradable fresco is the event; this exhibition is its resonance, its tangible reverse side: the studio as a work of art.
