Variations urbaines

March 7 – April 4, 2023
Violaine Desportes et Georges Autard 
Galerie Ars Longa

From February 21 to March 16, with its new exhibition “Variations Urbaines”, the Ars Longa gallery inaugurates the arrival of Violaine Desportes and consolidates, again and again, Georges Autard as the gallery’s representative artist. The relationship between these two artists may not be immediate, one coming from free figuration, the other from realism, but their paths and approaches are similar, in a beautiful coincidence that art sometimes likes to offer us.

In fact, Autard and Desportes did not immediately set out to produce art; Autard went into mathematics, Desportes into literature. But their passion for art caught up with them along the way. Nevertheless, they succeeded in bringing these other disciplines into dialogue in their productions, each more abundant than the last. Georges Autard borrowed its language, its signs and its blackboard, while Desportes borrowed its figures of speech, its narration and its black and white.

Their treatment of the everyday also comes together. Autard begins his work with familiar images of bicycles and glasses, in reference to Joseph Beuys, then moves on to the representation of silhouettes, followed by the mantra and the rhythmic gesture that accompanies it. Desportes, too, invokes the object in her work with her Autopsies, school kits with everything that characterizes them. From pens to calculators, the artist takes a poetic look at the figure of the schoolboy. She also offers expressive, enigmatic scenes with a cinematic feel, a sign of her inspiration from Ernest Pignon Ernest. Here, the artist depicts teenagers full of insolence and melancholy.

This exhibition is a way of bringing together two artists with a heightened sensitivity, offering lively, poetic works with a reflective content, both spiritual and artistic.

viewing room