Vernissage on Thursday 30 January from 6 pm

The gallery Polad-Hardouin is delighted to present the recent works by Timothy Archer and Christophe Boursault. The exhibition aims to highlight the specific universe of each artist, like a personal exhibition. Indeed, the two artists are drawn closer by the energy and sparkle radiating from their paintings.

Timothy Archer

Timothy Archer abandoned the canvas for paper, a material which he finds more sensual, more appropriate to his nightly visions. For Timothy Archer works mainly at night, in a workshop similar to a cell, packed to the ceiling with drawings, paintings and totems. There he devotes himself, with bulimic exuberance, to his charcoal or black-pastel drawings, giving rise to masks, demons, portraits, and fabulous animals. Then he goes back on his steps, on his original trace, and gives body and texture to his works with the intervention of colour. His flamboyant and vibrant palette seems contained within those black contours, but only to overflow and transgress them.
Although his world is somehow akin to that of German Expressionists (his drawings evoke the Hell of Beckman’s birds) and of naïf painters, although he draws his inspiration from African and Australasian art, images do not constitute his primary intention. Rather, they serve as a springboard to explore the possible sensations and emotions through the interplay of colours and matter. Andrew Gilbert writes about him: “Any attempt to rationally explain or describe Timothy Archer’s drawings, paintings, and masks, destroys the soul of his works and fails to capture their texture, smell, colour, their being marked and traversed by joy, violence and energy.”

Born in 1982 in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Timothy Archer lives and works in Lille. A recent graduate from Lille’s Faculty of Fine Arts, his drawings, paintings, and sculptures have been presented in collective exhibitions in Paris, Marseille, Berlin and Prague. He recently joined the gallery Polad-Hardouin. This is his first personal exhibition. The next one is planned in Lille for 2014 in the spring.

Christophe Boursault

A painter, graphic designer and performer, Boursault likes improvising, seizing the moment in his paintings and videos. In his paintings, this impulse allows him to capture the micro-variations of mental states, the tense stream of changing, contradictory sensations that pass through him. Shapes, signs, and words explode and collide. Between figuration and abstraction, this ensemble gives rise to clashing, lyrical dynamics, to a deconstructed movement. His search for speed, combined with a refusal of method, becomes a necessity, for this is where the perpetual contradiction between gestures and intention is inscribed.
His paintings – raw, straightforward, electrifying, but also mischievous – deliberately confuse the message and complicate our interpretation. The viewer needs some time to adapt and understand the melody of this subtle and fragile equilibrium, always on the verge of derailment. In the manner of a self-taught man, Boursault follows his own story, of course crossing paths with many others, but without ever seeking a comparison with other painters or pictorial trends.

After obtaining a DNSEP degree from Villa Arson in Nice in 2004, Christophe Boursault lived in Marseille for several years, where he presented his works in numerous exhibitions. He also took part in collective exhibitions in Europe (Prague, Burgos, London, Lausanne, Hamburg...) and the U.S. (New York). One of his videos was on display at the exhibition A la vie délibérée, about the history of performance on the French Riviera, at Villa Arson in 2012. He lives and works in Bourges since 2011. He is the leading artist of Team Lagardere Thug Life, a private structure dedicated to high-level artistic performance. This is his second solo exhibition at the gallery Polad-Hardouin, where he also took part in numerous collective exhibitions since 2010.