The group exhibition Cache-cache (Hide and Seek) brings together for the first time at the gallery works by Adrian Geller, Nathanaëlle Herbelin, Dora Jeridi, Nino Kapanadze, and Elené Shatberashvili.
The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.
Across a selection of twenty pieces, the exhibition invites us to interpret the artists’ childhood memories. The featured paintings do not show real images of their past but explore a reconstructed childhood and its narrative transformation. Delving into this “immense edifice of memory”, each artist imagines a kind of autobiographical fiction, a quasi-psychoanalytical journey through their work. For the young child who has no real sense of time and space, the game of hide and seek is useful. It helps the child understand that when the adult is out of sight, they do not disappear completely, their reappearance producing a pleasurable surprise and a nervous cry of relief.
Based on this premise, the five featured artists were asked to probe the unconscious and the chiaroscuro of their memories. Proust intuitively grasped the importance of introspection and psychic trauma for the development of the child’s unconscious conflicts, character, identity, sexuality, and even loss and mourning. It is clear that our memory is subject to various forms of distortion, and that our memories are recomposed fragments of real events: like pieces of a puzzle that do not quite fit together. Even if their childhood recollections are clear, the adult painter’s memories may have a kind of screening function during their aesthetic and iconographic quest. Because in painting, time flows in all directions, certainly towards the past but also towards the timeless.
Born in 1990 in Tbilisi, Georgia
Lives and works in Paris, France
The intimacy of Elené’s universe is both discreet and revelatory, her compositions putting her on stage to better efface herself. Her dazzling palette is used to create works in which elements intermingle and planes blend. This outstanding mastery of painting is complemented by a fragile sensitivity and work on a complex identity.
Born in 1989 in Israel
Lives and works in Paris, France
Soft, sensual, and luminous, Nathanaëlle Herbelin’s paintings plunge us into an intimacy of familiar and dreamy sensations that are almost universal. The interior scenes show characters in stolen moments of reverie; her portraits are psychological mirrors of the people she loves and who surround her. But her works are always imbued with a certain strangeness and a benevolent sweetness that plunge us into a delightful melancholy.
Born in 1988 in Paris, France
Lives and works in New York, USA
Dora Jeridi’s unclassifiable paintings are marked by a profusion of emotions and a physical experience that leaves no one indifferent. The power of her work is achieved through total mastery of color and line. Her compositions, sometimes baroque, sometimes violent, sometimes pure, are like painterly symphonies with catchy melodies. This furious need for expression is superbly mastered by juxtaposed constructions of space without being impervious to strange forms that challenge us and make us doubt.
More about the artist
Born in 1997 in Basel, Switzerland
Lives and works in Paris, France
Virtuosity and poetry are the hallmarks of this work of unlimited plurality, both in terms of its sources of inspiration and choice of mediums. Drawing on illustrious literary themes and anecdotes from daily life, his view of the world and nature sends us back to an imaginary realm where the presence of man is often excessive, disquieting, or out of place.
Framed : 34.5 × 44.5 cm | 13 9/16 × 17 1/2 inch
Born in 1990 in Tbilisi, Georgia
Lives and works in Paris, France
With her great mastery of color and line, she creates intimate scenes, sometimes populated by ghostly figures depicting an often utopian and fantastical family iconography. But for this young artist, the theme is only a pretext for powerful and unrestrained pictorial expression: she refuses to choose between figuration and abstraction seeking above all emotion and freedom through her relentless painting practice.
Diptych : 116 × 182 cm | 45 11/16 × 71 5/8 inch
