Gathered under the title Back Door Arcadia, Orlando Mostyn Owen’s recent paintings, made after a stay in Naples and Palermo, express the impossibility to represent the Golden Age.

There is a nostalgic dimension to the way in which he travels through history, searching for the traces inscribed in the Italian landscape, a combination of vestiges and modernity.
The canvasses present zones of trouble that challenge all harmony and order. The space suggested belongs to a staggering world, close to chaos:
“Fields covered with Etruscan tombs and condoms, Romanian and Nigerian prostitutes on the side of the road, sliced by the whiteness of the sun and the blackness of the shadow, here are our ‘forest nymphs’...” (Orlando Mostyn Owen)

The paintings evoke the survival of Antiquity, for instance through the figures of the Minotaur or Ariadne, or through these forest landscapes inhabited by curious “survivors” in a dense, sensual and mysterious intermingling.

What secret hides behind these disenchanted visions of a forever lost Arcadia? The work evokes an unquestionable decadence close to that of a modern Max Beckmann.

Catalogue
Artist interviewed by Elizabeth Couturier

The gallery presents a selection of artists who use drawing as their preferred medium.

As it obeys nothing but a movement of thought, drawing is an exercise of total freedom, far from aesthetic preoccupations, following no rules but those self-imposed by the artist.

They are solitary “Riders” in a quest for unknown lands, with an appetite for lines and colours, the voluptuousness of forms, the energy of the line or its very absence.

By gathering the artists in a single space while preserving their radical singularity and specificity, “Riders” becomes a collective work. The spectator will be immersed in the heart of drawing.

Around thirty artists are invited, among which: Gérard Alary, Pat Andréa, Lydie Arickx, Felicia Atkinson, Gwenaël Billaud, Vincent Bizien, Christophe Boursault, Daphné Chevallereau, Paul de Pignol, Raynald Driez, Vanessa Fanuele, Andrew Gilbert, Andreas Hofer, Marcel Hüppauff, Michael Kalmbach, Marcel Katuchevski, Fred Kleinberg, Cristina Lama, Fréderic Léglise, Julie Lorinet, Michel Macréau, Maryan, Matias Sanchez, Charlotte McGowan-Griffin, Orlando Mostyn Owen, Stani Nitkowski, Humberto Poblete-Bustamante, Eva Räder, Sylvia Reyftman, Emmanuelle Renard, Raphaëlle Ricol, Joanne Robertson, Jean Rustin, Lionel Sabatté, Adam Saks, Christine Sefolosha, Astrid Sourkova, Lucy Stein, Davor Vrankic, Wu Xiaohai, Eric Yahnker.

Exhibition proposal by Ileana Rodriguez