DREAMERS

ZUNDERLUST – SYLVAIN DUBRUNFAUT
photographs, paintings
March 4 – April 3, 2021
extended until July 3, 2021

The DREAMERS exhibition jointly presents the artist’s photographic collages Zunderlust and the paintings of Sylvain Dubrunfaut. Like an invitation to a summer stroll, these two worlds stand out while coming together around a lived youth or fantasized.

Bathed in a tender light, the bodies stretch out, embrace and turn around. Figures archetypal or borrowed characters, the individual fades away in favor of signs of age with shifting borders. Only the sensations or their memories remain. A foot that sinks into the sand, a ray of sunlight piercing through a closed eyelid.

In his photographic collages, Zunderlust captures these bodies on the fly and steals them from their context. To this initial shot he affixes digitally transformed spaces bordering on abstraction. Greedy for meaning, it is by forging links between these images that yet give all its place to chance, that our own stories and fantasies are played out. Sylvain Dubrunfaut’s workshop and his series called UN LONG PRINTEMPS (A LONG SPRING). Produced during confinement, the works synthesize another look at the youth perceived through films and photographs. The images chosen for what they are and what they evoke for the artist then retain all the immediacy of their original mediums and reveal them through the long and delayed time that painting allows. By borrowing these bodies, this surge of life, wherever it can be found, and by a skillful movement of visual appropriation, both open the possibility of (re) connecting to it a moment.

Nourished by a more or less conscious desire to seize this impalpable youthful vitality, neither the photographs nor the paintings in this exhibition command a reading. If this atmosphere created by the meeting of two distinct approaches gives free rein to our individual and collective imaginations, their reunion also raises certain aesthetic issues. Here, while painting has digested its raw material, often photographic or cinematographic, photography is adorned with an ornamental frame by deploying its artifices to aspire to the pictorial. From this convergence arises a tension between the mediums which opens even more so, the multiplicity of possible gazes on these fragments of intensity.