Pierre MONESTIER Incursions

The Huberty & Breyne?s Paris | Chapon ? 21 gallery is delighted to be showing Incursions, an exhibition of work by Pierre Monestier featuring a new body of paintings.

For three decades now, Pierre Monestier has been assembling a singular body of work that is instantly recognisable and where the image functions less as a narrative than as a visual enigma. As he himself says, "What I create above all are images" a statement that illuminates the essential nature of his work, in which meaning never precedes form but, instead, emerges from it, in a fluid, unstable and open-ended way.

The works assembled here are an extension of the Monestier universe, which is at once organic, symbolic and cerebral, a world populated with hybrid figures, metamorphosed beings, enigmatic creatures and ambiguous presences. Images generate images, alter, fuse and proliferate within rigorously constructed spaces that are governed by a singular internal logic. 

With Monestier, painting is a process of variations, shifts and combinations. A figure reappears in another form; a motif migrates from one canvas to another; a physical attitude, a colour or an object is subtly transformed to become part of the artist?s visual language. Series by series, he develops a perpetually evolving repertoire where mythological references, archaic symbols and formal inventions intersect.

Far from being narrative or illustrative, Monestier's work primarily engages the viewer in an experience of seeing. He or she is constantly referred back to the materiality of the image: harsh light, crisp shadows, destabilised perspectives and acid colours ? which can be almost unreal ? compose scenes whose mystery lies less in what they represent than in their manner of existing pictorially.

This tension between formal precision and strangeness places Pierre Monestier in a lineage of inventors of form?from Picasso to Magritte and Brauner to Topor?while simultaneously asserting a profoundly personal vision. His figures, often drawn from an imaginary realm that is either archaic or unconscious, seem to emerge from a buried collective memory: men with stag heads, composite creatures, fragmented or proliferating figures, compose a silent theatre where fantasy coexists with a strange kind of reality.

Born in 1963, Pierre Monestier lives and works in Marseille. A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, since the late 1990s he has been developing a body of work that has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in France and internationally.

With Incursions, Pierre Monestier continues his exploration of the image as an autonomous space. Forms generate one another according to an internal logic where body can become landscape, two figures merge into a third, a detail suddenly shift to the centre of the composition.

In this densely populated, silent universe, the viewer is invited to SEE and free to interpret at will.