Drawing Now 2025
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DRAWING NOW PARIS 2025
Louis Lanne, Morgane Ely, Arnaud Rochard
MAR 27th - MAR 30th, 2025
CARREAU DU TEMPLE, PARIS, FRANCE
Booth B1
For Drawing Now 2025, we are pleased to present works by Louis Lanne, winner of the Novembre à Vitry prize in 2024.
Louis Lanne has chosen a rather unconventional medium for his work: the Velleda board, by nature ephemeral and erasable. His work plays with this impermanence: on his Velleda board, layers of materials that are seemingly incompatible, such as oil paint, felt-tip pens, glue, resin, and tar, are superimposed between translucency and concealment to form microcosms saturated with colors and signs. Each line or shape is temporary, capable of being erased or diluted by the layer of paint and resin that follows.
In an imagination imbued with childlike irony, Louis Lanne captures whatever crosses his mind: his works testify to the spontaneity of the sketch that generates absurd little scenes. From the Saint Luc School in Belgium to the Estienne School, the artist has built a solid foundation in comic book publishing, which evolved into painting and was further strengthened at the École des Beaux-arts in Paris.
Louis Lanne lives and works in Paris. He is artist in residence at Poush Manifesto and is a graduate of the École Estienne and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, with honors from the jury. His work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions in Paris, Madrid, Lyon, and Barcelona.
We are also exhibiting a series of works by Morgane Ely, the winner of the Villa Noailles Emerige Révélations Prize in 2023. Following this award, she presented ‘Pink Spring’, an exhibition of 29 wood engravings and a diorama created during her residency at the Villa Noailles in Hyères.
The intimate black walls reveal portraits of young women prey to the pleasures of the flesh, like the first flowers of spring about to bloom. Blending eroticism and lust, these images from binibon (ビニぼん), Japanese erotic magazines, paint a portrait of the fantasized Japanese woman. Morgane Ely reactivates an ancient tradition, that of shunga (春画), pornographic prints depicting the pleasures of the body, dating from the Edo period (1603 to 1868). Until this period, eroticism in Japan was not transgressive, and there was never any taboo in the Japanese collective unconscious linked to sex. But with the transition to the Meiji era (from 1868 onwards), the arrival of Westerners – outraged by such casualness – considerably altered the relationship to nudity and sex. The Western puritan model took hold, and Japan experienced increased sexual repression and violent censorship of shunga.
In her practice, Morgane Ely reappropriates images, mainly from the Internet, of female figures that she erects as feminist icons. She hijacks the technique of traditional Japanese printmaking, presenting her pink wooden matrices engraved and then inked.
inked.
Text by Celine Furet
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Morgane Ely, Pink Spring, Villa Noailles 2024, ©Luc Bertrand
Morgane Ely was born in 1995 in Hayange, Lorraine, France. After graduating from the Beaux-Arts de Nancy, then the Beaux-Arts de Paris, where she was introduced to screen printing, she spent 6 months at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo, where she was trained in printmaking and wood engraving by masters Akira Suzuki and Tsuyoshi Hirai. In 2021, she won the 42nd Prix du Prestige Takifuji and the Prix de la gravure at the Biennale de Sarcelles, then in 2022 the Prix Rose Taupin – Dora Bianka, and finally the Prix Villa Noailles at the latest Révélations Emerige. After a residency at Villa Noailles, she will have a solo exhibition at the Ancien Evéché de Toulon in 2025. She lives and works in Paris.
A former resident of the Casa Velázquez, Arnaud Rochard develops a transdisciplinary practice combining engraving – in all its forms – painting, and drawing.
Neither quite a painter nor quite a sculptor, Arnaud Rochard lies within the realm of both techniques. From drawing to engraving, he exhausts his precise and unique gesture in the discovery of a line. On paper, linen, wood, and clay, the medium becomes linked to him through a disconcerting alchemy. Sometimes left raw and exposed, the material integrates into the composition. This process, close to the craftsmanship of art, is explored in a universe inspired by both wild, cruel, and shadowy imagery and the fantastical parade of mythological romanticism.
However, these figurative codes, though present as clues, never overwhelm the perception of the whole, which is that of a landscape composed of dense and scattered vegetation. The object of his research then reveals itself: Nature and the allegory of Liberty. One might be deceived, as the nightmarish dream mingles with reality at the borders of dystopia, where chaos becomes the receptacle of imagination. Abstraction then reveals itself as the motif of the work. The lines intertwine, the strokes vary in thickness, and the shapes are drawn in the voids and the filled spaces.
Then color enters into a game of appearance and disappearance, passing to the surface, either in broad or defined zones, in nuances of luminosity that exalt depth. The gaze insinuates itself, clears the way, gets lost, and then returns, much like an explorer handling a spyglass. A dense aesthetic content, where each mark leads to another in an initiatory journey that projects itself into infinity.
Text by Maëlle Delaplanche.
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Arnaud Rochard graduated from the École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne. He lives and works between Brussels and Guérande. In 2018, he received the grant of creation from DRAC Pays de Loire and, in 2019, the Pierre Cardin Prize for engraving from the Académie des Beaux Arts.