Rethinking our connection to the living world

Clément Davout (*1993) is both a painter and a musician. His work has recently been shown in various institutions and galleries in Belgium, France, Germany, and Luxembourg. Born in Flers, he graduated from the École Supérieure d’Arts et Médias de Caen/Cherbourg in 2017. He currently lives and works in the Paris region. Clément Davout paints shadows of plants. In a short text presenting his work, he writes that he practices a painting style with a “figurative tendency.” The expression is striking - it situates his work in an in-between, a grey area. A shadow is not the motif itself, but already its projection. The ones painted by Clément Davout are diffuse, evanescent, mobile—they belong less to drawing than to what Hubert Damisch described as “matter aspiring to form,” in reference to clouds. The artist, who has removed black from his palette, associates these shadows with a background painted in the same color ranges, where variations evoke a diaphanous luminosity. One could say that Clément Davout paints painting itself. Conversely, one might focus on the subject of these works—the choice of a domesticated nature that refers to the immediate environment in all its simplicity and banality. But the essence may lie more in the tension this approach creates with the image. Working from photographs, these projected shadows become colorful vibrations of pictorial matter; they are then inserted as fragments into a surface whose color corresponds, in painting, to a color chart obtained by placing the work on Instagram. In these back-and-forths, the aim is clearly to bring back into painting what could otherwise remain just image - under the logic of contemporary visual circulation. It becomes clear, then, how this practice is rooted in the present day, as a subtle form of resistance. In a world that demands transparency, where everyone becomes its agent through social media and where a one-dimensional relationship with things prevails, the choice of shadow can only stand out. It is the choice of ambiguity and uncertainty, of the repressed and the elusive.

Serge Ecker (*1982) is an artist based in Luxembourg. His work explores craftsmanship, notions of memory and improvisation, as well as the vanity associated with new technologies. His work has been exhibited at the Luxembourg Pavilion of Architecture at the 15th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, at the Centre des Arts Pluriels (Ettelbruck), the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Kunstraum (Vienna), Technopolis (Athens), the Neumünster Abbey (Luxembourg), the Centre d’Art Dominique Lang and Néi Liicht (Dudelange), and Casino Luxembourg. Ecker tries to find symbolic relevance in the most insignificant details, often left unnoticed. The intention to document and capture the world around him. Between formalism and the impenetrable aspect of facades and textures, with an approach based on the architectural density, reflected in his work, by adopting a contemporary approach, composition and visual language. Contrary to classical documentary photography, his images refuse “drama” and are detached from their subject and the photographer's presence. The subject of urban sprawl generates transformed landscapes, used, exploited and left by their occupants, offering thus a “playground” in these transitory zones, the in-betweens. Ecker navigates and translates between handicrafts and improvisation in the spectre of new technologies. Facing the de-valorisation of craftsmanship and work in general, through relocations of production and virtualisation, in an attempt to dethrone the myth of the digital, 3D printing and other contemporary technological vanities. Ecker re-appropriates and synthesises the real and questions its authenticity, sometimes with an intentional cynic tint. What stays of the captured object after its multimedia transfer from the real-virtual-real? An emersion from cyberspace, the post-digital ...

Léo Fourdrinier (*1992) lives and works in Toulon. After training at the Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique de Nîmes and studying literature, he graduated from the Ecole Supérieure d’Arts et Médias de Caen/Cherbourg in 2017.
His work has recently been exhibited in France and Europe at the 16th Biennale d’art contemporain (Lyon, FR), the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes (FR), the Galerie Les filles du calvaire (Paris, FR), Un Été Au Havre (FR), Arts Éphémères (Marseille, FR), HATCH (Paris, FR), the Fondation Fiminco (Romainville, FR), the Confort Moderne (Poitiers, FR), Hôtel Des Arts TPM (Toulon, FR), Centre d’art contemporain de Châteauvert (FR), EESAB (Quimper, FR), Bains-Douches (Alençon, FR), Triennale Gist (Zennevallei, BE), à la Vallée (Bruxelles, BE), Art Au Centre (Liège, BE), Hestia (Belgrade, RS), Institut Français (Madrid, ES), Palazzo San Giuseppe (Polignano a mare, IT), Spinnerei (Leipzig, DE)…
Léo Fourdrinier was a finalist in the 9th Bourse Révélations Émerige (2022), won the Prix de la collection Marval at Art-o-rama, Marseille (2023), and has worked in various residency programmes: Le Confort Moderne (Poitiers, FR), Fugitif (Leipzig, DE), 40mcube/GENERATOR (Rennes, FR), Centre d’art contemporain de Châteauvert (FR). Also curator, Léo Fourdrinier is associate artist at the cultural place Le Port Des Créateurs (Toulon, FR). Léo Fourdrinier’s work is represented by the gallery Les filles du calvaire (Paris, FR)

Aline Forçain (*1988), a multi-disciplinary artist born in France and based in Brussels, trained in Europe at the School of Fine Arts of Toulouse, Brussels Academy of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Complutense University in Madrid. Coming from a farming background, she questions our relationship with the world through the prism of landscape. She has taken part in several group exhibitions in Europe as well as artistic residencies, notably in Belgium at Kult XL Ateliers, the Villa Empain - Fondation Boghossian, the Centre Culturel de Namur, the Masereel and more recently in Norway at the Nordic Artists' Centre Dale and in South Africa with the Saffca Foundation. In 2016, she carried out a public commission for the Cercle Cité institution and in 2019, Nosbaum Reding Projects gallery organized her first solo exhibition. She has received several grants for her artistic research and she joined the Level 5 artist's collective in 2022. Having recently exhibited at Plagiarama and at Odradek, she will soon be exhibiting at the Pianofabriek in Brussels.