Solo show
Thomas Fougeirol, IHI, 2025, Oil and pigment on canvas, 116 x 89 cm., 45 ¾ x 35 in. (TFO-2503)
About
Sébastien Bertrand is pleased to present Thomas Fougeirol’s (1965, Valence) first solo show at the gallery. In Fougeirol’s work, painting occupies an uncertain space between surface and relief, image and matter.
The canvases gathered here are repeints, or repaints. The term comes from the vocabulary of conservation, where it designates a layer added over an existing painting, most often by another hand. Fougeirol uses it in reverse: it is he who covers an earlier body of work, his Dust Paintings, made over some ten years, whose dust and debris now disappear beneath a new layer. At first glance, his canvases appear to belong to the realm of monochrome. Yet, as the eye lingers, this apparent unity begins to dissolve. The surface reveals itself as a dense field of striations, grooves, traces, deposits and cavities. Pigment accumulates, settles, recedes and rises, gradually transforming the canvas into an almost autonomous material presence.