Météorites | Adrien Jutard

Against a backdrop that he wanted to be atmospheric, replaying and reinterpreting the Impressionist tradition – a movement whose nebulous sensuality ends up and dissolves in American abstract expressionism, for example – Adrien Jutard acts as a tough minimalist, tracing surgical motifs, pure and bold, difficult to penetrate, “paths that lead only to painting” to quote Carl André’s commentary on the work of Franck Stella. These two visions of art, which clashed in the twentieth century, replay their dichotomies here within each painting, thanks to technical innovations that make these characteristics even sharper. And that’s where their stimulating tension lies, in the fact that they never stop questioning our eye, never rest.

And where do “meteorites”, the title of the exhibition, fit into all this? As the poet would say, they are calm blocks of earth, “fallen from an obscure disaster”, but their condensed, geometric unity seems to make them emissaries from a distant elsewhere, bringing a purer meaning to the pictorial medium.