Donatien MARY On verra bien

The Mycélium project

Inaugural exhibition

Mycélium is delighted to be launching its artistic programme at the Huberty & Breyne gallery with work by Donatien Mary.

Donatien Mary is a multi-talented author, artist and children's book illustrator based in Paris. Exceptionally versatile and therefore difficult to pigeonhole, he adapts his technique to suit the project in hand, switching between drawing and engraving, colour and black & white, figurative and abstract, constantly varying his style, approach and support and using words as a medium to create a powerful and audacious multi-sensory narrative.

For On verra bien, its first exhibition, Mycélium is focusing on Donatien Mary's 'writings in colour' ('écritures en couleur'). Whether in single drawings, series of illustrations or comic strips, and regardless of the narrative timescale, colour is central to the viewer's experience here, providing a sense of rhythm and pace, and Donatien Mary works in the manner of a choreographer, using the marriage of text and image to draw us into his glorious worlds of the imagination.

Mycélium

Mycélium is a new initiative being developed by the Huberty & Breyne gallery which, in the first instance, will occupy the mezzanine-level exhibition space at the gallery's avenue Matignon venue.

Conceived as a novel approach to the graphic arts, exploring the point at which these arts, in all their ramifications, intersect with one another, Mycélium aims - through a mixture of collective and solo exhibitions - to establish an artistic identity that is at once coherent and eclectic.

Amélie Payan, who devised the project, is passionate about literature and the visual arts and eager to explore what happens when the two come together - the tenuous relationship between words and drawing, narrative and emotion, reading and looking.

Seen from this perspective, the hybrid art of comic strip offers an ideal medium for the artist who is simultaneously the writer - or vice versa - to keep coming up with new ideas and breaking formal rules, and so invent a potent sensory writing that mediates an artistic dialogue where the drawn line can become a word, and the word can become a line. In this 'amphigraphic' art, drawing and narration come together to create a new visual language.

The idea behind the Mycélium project is to be present at this crossover point and explore just what the drawn line can do - to go beyond drawing as a utilitarian or transitional concept and treat the medium as an experimental 'vocabulary', explore different artistic 'ways of writing' and thereby consolidate the continuum of the arts.

The artists involved in this project - both established and emerging - explore multiple graphic forms that enable them to keep extending the expressive power of drawing. Drawing is affirmed as a creative, organic and living act, a vibrant thing that resonates with other artistic forms, in the same way that, for the poet Charles Baudelaire, 'perfumes, colours and sounds correspond'.  The idea is to explore the porousness of artistic boundaries, allow drawing to vibrate, like a living language, and so provoke thought.

Private view

Wednesday 12 April 2023, from 6.00 pm to 9.00 pm, in the presence of the artist

Exhibition

Thursday 13 April to Saturday 13 May 2023

Works available to view online

Thursday 13 April 2023

PARIS | Matignon
Mezzanine
36 avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris
Monday > Saturday 11.00 am - 7.00 pm