Emmanuel Régent - Beneath Any Sky

This season, the Fondation Maeght presents Emmanuel Régent (born 1973, lives and works between Villefranche-sur-Mer and Paris) in the gallery dedicated to temporary exhibitions in the Fondation’s extension. Exploring the theme of ruin, the artist brings together ten recent large-scale works on paper and an etching. Here, a devastated city; there, a motionless crowd, a sinking boat, or an aeroplane that has just crashed…

The subjects of his drawings, strikingly contrasted, appear almost overexposed, as though on the verge of disappearing. Régent uses black Indian ink markers to fill in the darker areas, creating a graphic grain reminiscent of the pixels of digital images, yet through a traditional technique. His work seeks to understand how the digital revolution and new technologies can influence the practice of drawing, a medium rooted in longstanding traditions.

Here, ruin is not merely a backdrop but a subject in its own right, inherited from a long pictorial tradition in which it became an emblem of vanitas. Hubert Robert painted imaginary ruins in which the grandest architecture invariably crumbled into scattered stones overrun by vegetation, reminding us that every form of human power already carries within it the seeds of its own decline. Later, Caspar David Friedrich set his Gothic ruins in desolate northern landscapes, less to mourn the past than to question what remains of a civilisation once time has run its course. The same question runs through the drawings in this exhibition: what remains standing when everything collapses, and what does that which survives tell us?

“I would like my drawings to act like a carnivorous plant, attracting the eye through their ambiguity with photography, through the dexterity and patience required by the slow, meticulous process of working with an ink marker. I want them to captivate through the skill of their execution, and through their unapologetically figurative and decorative representation, until the eye takes it all in and understands that the building is collapsing, the boat is sinking and the aeroplane has just crashed. It is then that reality closes in on the eye, which tips to the other side, beyond the looking glass.”

Emmanuel Régent