SHOWROOM
SPRING 2024
PERMANENT INSTALLATION
Léa Belooussovitch
Marion Charlet
Dorian Cohen
Laura Garcia Karras
Jacques Julien
Bence Magyarlaki
Qi Zhuo
PARIS-B is pleased to present its spring showroom, a permanent exhibition unveiling artworks from a selection of artists represented by the gallery.
Léa Belooussovitch‘s explores the aesthetics of disappearance, in order to challenge our societal response to graphic violence. Her work, such as “Wrapped Bodies,” delves into the vulnerability of specific moments, shedding light on the artist’s humanity.
Recreating photographies documenting scenes of war, disaster or catastrophe using coloured pencils on felt, she blurs the image until it’s indistinguishable from the original. However the nebulous waves of colours, despite their ethereal appearance, still carry the violence of its template. As such, the image comes forth as ephemeral as a ghost, resembling the imprint of its origin in our memories. Despite the viewer’s physical proximity to the artwork, they remain distanced from the harsh reality. This deliberate emphasis on the gap between the signified and the signifier is a central theme in her work.
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Paris in 1989, she currently lives and works in Brussels. After receiving a master’s degree in drawing from the ENSAV La Cambre in 2014, she was nominated for the 2016 edition of the Prix Révélations Emerige, she is also the winner of the 2018 edition of the Young Talents prize of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles. In 2020, she was rewarded by the Prix des partenariats Musée d’art moderne et contemporain Saint Etienne Métropole in France.
MARION CHARLET
Marion Charlet’s art is driven by an imaginary that crosses reality in powerful compositions, whose primary function is to assert an aesthetic where colour is both the pretext and the text. Working from photographs that she takes herself and then modifies on her computer, the artist firstly created a world of original landscapes and interiors, most often architectural, surroundedby profuse vegetation, and devoid of all human presence. Colour is the driving factor in how Charlet constructs each of her paintings and watercolours, bringing the motif to the fullness of its form. The skillful combination of intensity, transparency and opacity give the painted image its depth, its rhythm, its breath, the artist playing sometimes with empty space, sometimes with full… here an intrusion, while there a screen.
BIOGRAPHY
Marion Charlet was born in Paris in 1982. After graduating from the École des Beaux-Arts, the Villa Arson (Nice), the Chelsea College of Art and Design (London) and the Institut Supérieur des Art Appliqués (Paris), she currently lives and works in Paris. She was the winner of the Prix Art [ ] Collector in 2018 and the Prix de la Fondation Colas in 2016.
Dorian Cohen employs a realistic figurative approach rooted in classical tradition to explore naturalistic genre scenes, urban imagery within landscapes and mirages. Structured as series, his works recounts woven snippets of the mundane by examining the interplay of pictorial and narration mechanics within each of these series.
“Dorian Cohen speaks of his “natural stories” in which he seeks an “inner naturalism”, those innocuous and repeated moments that tirelessly punctuate our lives, sources of ephemeral joy and tenacious melancholy. His fluid and velvety touch, never photorealistic but always perfectly neat, keeps in it the gesture of the painter, which makes it exciting. The artist never reproduces images using an overhead projector but draws everything by hand and you can feel that. […] In fact, each element of the decor, for which the eyes delight in their finesse, respond to each other and make sense.”
— Julie Chaizemartin, Journalist and art critic
BIOGRAPHY
Dorian Cohen is a young French painter born in 1987. He lives and works in Paris. He has a degree in urban design and engineering and is self-taught as a painter. His paintings were revealed to the art world in 2017 during the 62nd Montrouge Salon. In 2018, he won the Colas Foundation Award and in 2019 he was nominated for the 10th edition of the Sciences PO Contemporary Art Award.
Under the dim light of her studio, on a floor scattered with paint stains, the artist unfolds large white canvases on the wall, ranging from the size of a hand to that of her body. After a sketch barely traced with the tip of a pencil, the brush comes into action, the act of painting. The artist’s hand should no longer be a mere executor responding to the orders from the dominated to the dominant. With it, our gaze follows long strokes, where oil paint reveals the guts of the idea rather than its own consistency. Applied in a single gesture, the oil tolerates no hesitation, and it’s up to the artist to stretch it to reveal its flexibility, offering our view a palette of nuances. Among linear gradients and steep slopes, we try to imagine the pressure and caress of the brush, the thickness and fluidity of the material, the precision and vivacity of a perfectly skillful gesture.
BIOGRAPHY
Laura Garcia Karras (b.1988, Les Lilas) graduated from La Cambre, Brussels and then the Beaux-Arts de Paris. In 2018, she was the winner of the Concours Fondation Crédit Agricole in France and she won the third place of the Prix Antoine Marin, presented by Bernard Frize. She is now artist resident in the Poush Manifesto in Aubervilliers, France.
Jacques Julien skillfully intertwines analytical and poetic elements with a touch of humor in his works. To him, a sculpture serves as the inception toward the unseen, the absent corporeal form, or the vacant figure. Since the 1990s, the artist has dedicated his efforts to contemplating the essence of form: from its conception and realization to its eventual relinquishment.
Consequently, Julien’s artistic narrative revolves around the act of sculpting within the confines of the studio, where time unfolds and dissipates, mirroring the ephemerality of life. His creations are a succession of empirical experiments, striving to attain a semblance of autonomy congruent with the environment that birthed them. The persistent focus on the relationship to space remains essential in his explorations.
BIOGRAPHY
Jacques Julien was born in 1967 in Lons le Saunier, he lives and works in Paris and Montdidier (80). He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes and at the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Grenoble. He is a lecturer at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris la Villette. In 2021, he was in the art residency at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome. Since 2000, his work has been the subject of major exhibitions at the CRAC Occitane, the Frac Normandie and the Domaine de Chamarande. His works are also in numerous public collections such as the FNAC or the Frac Bretagne, Bourgogne, Pays de la Loire…
BENCE MAGYARLAKI
Working within the medium of sculpture, installation and sound, Bence Magyarlaki’s practice seeks to uncover the connection points between architecture and body politics, while exploring themes such as intimacy, body memory and sexuality. Sculpture is defined by the artist as a memento to an embodied architecture that we ingest through the various layers of conditioning that our bodies endure under our current capitalist, binary, heteropatriarchal system. Magyarlaki’s work gives form to this embodied architecture: the socio-political, psycho-sexual, spiritual and mental construction of the self that regulates its extention: a constantly evolving-moving-desiring body.
BIOGRAPHY
Bence Magyarlaki (b. 1992) is a Hungarian artist currently based in Paris. Magyarlaki graduated with first class honours from BA (Hons) Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, London in 2017 and has since been exhibiting internationally in the UK, France, Morocco, Portugal, Turkey and Australia. Their latest body of work has been supported by Montresso Art Foundation in Marrakesh. Their work was nominated for The MullenLowe NOVA Awards (2017), and The International Takifuji Art Award (2017).
Often damaged with time, the sculptures are broken, fractured with limbs missing. Qi Zhuo got the idea to bring them back to life, to restore them in his own unique way: he’s going to use blown glass to fill the void, the lost fragment. Thus, a new life cycle is formed as the pre-existing artwork becomes another, evoking the bouddhist’s reincarnation cycle.
The chemistry occuring between the shape of the age-old originnal stone sculpture with the contemporary and delicate aspect of the colored glass carrying the statuette leads us into the peculiar, the incongruous which are concepts dear to the artist, for whom humor and transgression are natural forms of communication.
Qi Zhuo fuels his artistic practice with the daily experience of the semantic and linguistic miracles generated by cultural gaps and their long history of misunderstandings.
BIOGRAPHY
Qi Zhuo was born in 1985 in Fuxin (Liaoning province, China). He graduated with honors from the Le Mans Higher School of Fine Arts (the DNSEP Diploma), did the post graduate program KAOLIN of the ENSA Limoges in France and the Geneva University of Art and Design in Switzerland, he has been working and living in France since 2008. He did a residency at the Fondation Martell in Cognac, France at the end of 2020.
