DOUBLE SENS : Stéphane Pencréac’h - Nazanin Pouyandeh

26 June - 24 July 2021

Overview

‘Double Sens’ [‘Double Meaning’] brings together the work of two painters, Nazanin Pouyandeh and Stéphane Pencréac’h. The exhibition juxtaposes their respective visions, each of which is made up of illusions, allusions, and inversions that multiply the possible meanings of their work.

The two artists have known each other for many years, and share a conception of painting that speaks to a deeply rooted and long-established pictorial current which is only now finding its place in the field of contemporary art. Their captivating figurative painting focuses first and foremost on form as a means of powerfully evoking universal affects and, particularly with this exhibition, the spirit of the age.

Characterized by an unapologetic attention to detail, their paintings function at once as inner mental landscapes and genre scenes (in every sense of the term) that offer a portrait – that perhaps even literally are portraits – of our present era.

Animated by eroticism and human passions, their work serves as an affirmation of total freedom and of the undisguised pleasure both painters take in their medium, a pleasure which manifests as a desire for convulsive beauty.

In her paintings, Nazanin Pouyandeh pursues a double approach wherein she evokes various cultures - referencing African, Oriental and Western art - whilst undertaking a mise en abyme of her own practice. Blending characters into one another and into the decors that surround them, she deploys a polyphonic chromati

c range that borders on the wild and which makes possible a near-infinite number of interpretations.

Stéphane Pencréac’h meanwhile presents here a series of new paintings on wood entitled ‘Les Tricheurs’ [‘The Cheaters’]. With a chiaroscuro reminiscent of Caravaggio, he depicts characters who play with, confront and love one another. An almost silent intimacy at work in these paintings encourages the kind of slow contemplation that can gradually reveal hidden meanings amongst various complexities and ambiguities.

Further readings are made possible by the artists’ practice of mutual citation: they not only make formal and iconographic references to one another’s work, but have also depicted one another upon their canvases.