Fabio VISCOGLIOSI La Vie au grand air
Presentation
With La Vie au grand air, Fabio Viscogliosi brings together a collection of recent paintings and drawings, original artwork from Rococo Notes and pages featuring the return of the wandering cat from his early books. The result is an exhibition that juxtaposes different periods and genres from the artist’s career but without attempting a retrospective overview; it reveals, instead, the connections that have long existed between his various practices. The exhibition is due to run from Friday 16 October to Saturday 21 November 21 at our Paris | Matignon gallery.
Drawing is an essential part of this continuum. Viscogliosi draws as a form of daily journal-keeping, and drawing is also a space where motifs emerge that may later find a new life in painting. Yet the transition from one to the other is never a case of simple transposition. As the artist paints, the original image continues to develop and the painting finds its own logic.
This autonomy owes a great deal to the way Fabio Viscogliosi constructs his compositions. Beneath the immediate clarity of the drawing, the painting relies on a precise balance between shapes, colours and untouched areas. His – deliberately limited – palette has evolved over the years and the bare canvas itself may form part of the finished painting, as another “colour”. While the motif is always visible – and sometimes almost familiar – it gradually ceases to be the true subject. What matters more is how the image holds together, how one colour gives rise to another, and how a shape finds its place within the whole.
Viscogliosi’s figures often appear to have been captured in an in-between moment. Something has just happened, or might be about to happen, but nothing is ever fully explained. This sense of suspension lends the scenes their distinctive calm – and that slight strangeness that runs through much of his work. The landscape itself is not merely a backdrop; it plays a part in the composition and the rhythm of the piece.
This exhibition is like a subtly unfolding story, less a continuous narrative than a series of correspondences between the different works. Viscogliosi’s approach owes much to the way a book unfolds – to the succession of pages and the interplay between separate images. Viscogliosi himself speaks of a thread that gradually emerges from one work to the next.
La Vie au grand air may be said perhaps to conjure up the very presence of forms, beings and things before a story has even begun – a fleeting presence that Fabio Viscogliosi seeks not so much to explain as to evoke.
OPENING
Thursday 15 October 2026
from 6 p.m.
in the presence of the artist
EXHIBITION
From Friday 16 October
to Saturday 21 November 2026
PARIS | Matignon
36 avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris
Wednesday > Saturday 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.