Paréidolie - Salon international du dessin contemporain

For Paréidolie 2021, Galerie 8+4 is pleased to present several sets of drawings or collages revolving around the question of landscape, by four artists, each from a different generation: Vera Molnar, Philippe Favier, Claire Trotignon and Lionel Sabatté.

Vera Molnar
At 97 years old, Vera Molnar now occupies a singular place in the history of art for having pioneered a practice exploring the relationship between art and computers. Within her body of work, one theme stands out in particular: the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. This rock formation, which she considers to be one of the rare natural and deformed examples of a mathematical equation (Gausse curve), has become the theme of a thousand variations, either dictated to the computer or, on the contrary, freely realized by hand. At the heart of the stand, we will present on the main wall a set of drawings from the artist's studio, made with pencil, torn paper or gouache. They will answer to some computer drawings declining in bright colors this motif so famous in the history of art. With nearly twenty works in different formats and techniques, this exceptional presentation prefigures the various tributes that will be dedicated to him, including an exhibition at the next Venice Biennale.

Philippe Favier
Philippe Favier is best known for his detour of antique objects gleaned from flea markets, objects that he rectifies, paints, and enhances with colors or drawings. However, Philippe Favier remains above all an extraordinary draughtsman, as attested to in the early days of his career, when he distinguished himself by an unrepentant and iconoclastic line that allowed him to deploy a bestiary of monsters, skeletons, glyphs or goblins. As if to better surprise or even mislead his public, his steps led him to become passionate about landscapes, or more exactly the memory of them. From carbon paper masking him only what he realizes, he draws in blind the stretches of some places formerly contemplated. The horizon line becomes undulating lines, plains, hills or mountain outlines. Like punctuations or notes on a long score, rocks, plants, trees or simple bushes appear. Of an extreme refinement, these original drawings speak above all of this sensitive and memorial relationship that we establish with our universe and more particularly with the landscapes. About fifteen of these carbon drawings will be presented.

Claire Trotignon
Unlike the other two artists, Claire Trotignon does not refer to existing places. What she constructs through her collages enhanced with drawings and colored inks, are generic landscapes condensing in the same representation different times. This young artist has indeed made a name for herself over the last ten years by using fragments of old engravings that she assembles in ethereal compositions where the void counts more than the elements gathered. The textures of engraved lines from which often emerge some solitary trees are then used as a basis for fragmented representations that she enhances with utopian drawn architectures. Between reminiscence of the weight of our past and hope for the promises of our future, these landscapes speak above all of our present and of the impossibility that is imposed on us to still weave deep links between our culture and nature. For Claire Trotignon, the landscape becomes the symbol of a loss but also the possibility of a new understanding of our reality, including in its most metaphorical dimension. Recently, her work has taken a new direction, notably by the realization of works halfway between sculpture, collage and drawing, which will be presented at Paréidolie.

Lionel Sabatté
The sphere of the living and the transformations of matter due to the passage of time are at the heart of Lionel Sabatté's work. For several years now, the artist has been collecting materials that bear the trace of a past experience: dust, ashes, coal, dead skin, tree stumps... These elements are combined in an unexpected way and the works thus created carry in them at the same time a delicacy but also a "disturbing strangeness", giving life to a hybrid bestiary in which creatures of the abyssal depths côtoient small birds of the oxidized islands, bears, wolves, emus, owls, but also of the unicorns... Its unbridled and inhabited compositions let emerge a whole fantastic world, for better losing itself in the meanders of an imaginary landscape. Practicing at the same time painting, drawing, engraving and sculpture, Lionel Sabatté tries to make dialogue the whole of his works in a permanent interconnection. His research on the mineral, the animal, the organic in short, gives rise to poetic, sensitive, disturbing works that participate in a global reflection on our condition and the place we occupy in our environment.  We find this strength in his latest work created between February and April 2021 during a residency at Urdla in Villeurbanne. Presented for the first time at Paréidolie, this exceptional set of monotypes leaves the eye free to perceive the appearance of chimeras or glyphs, to see a bestiary of animals from the abyss or from our dreams, or even a simple human profile drowned in a maelstrom of material...