Painting 

The gallery's words

Raoul P. Brosseau is from Brittany (France). Perhaps you guessed it? Certainly, the Bretons have this ability to talk about what is essential to them, the ocean.  They live with the water, become one with the elements, blend into the aquatic environment. Raoul P.Brosseau has inherited a strong character from them and with the Atlantic Ocean as a backdrop, he paints childhood memories on pine lined beaches. Swimmers rewrite history, sometimes lying a little to make it more beautiful than it was.
"Water is an element where you forget yourself, where you disappear. When we swim, we are no longer just ourselves but one with it. Time no longer exists. And when you come out of it, there's still that mysterious little smile on my swimmers' faces, at once disillusioned and satisfied. »
So if Raoul P. Brosseau has always been swimming, he has also been painting since his early childhood. Drawings then paintings but it remains a pleasure of the lost hours. Raoul becomes a teacher, bookseller, journalist, press attaché, does communication, plays the ukulele in a band, writes detective stories... A busy literary and artistic life, then encouraging encounters allow him to participate in his first exhibitions. The artist will imagine this passage as follows: "as one jumps from a diving board a little too high, to realize delighted that everything is going well" the artist then devotes himself fully to the painting that has accompanied him all his life.
His work revolves around mixed media, acrylic. A mixture of flat and relief, bright or gray colors. Contrast is one of the keys of his expression, like a shift that you don't expect.
Today, for less than ten years, Raoul P. Brosseau has participated in many artistic events, has exhibited in several galleries, particularly in the west of France.
And Raoul P. Brosseau is happy.

Words from the gallery

Raoul P. Brosseau contacted me by email during the period of confinement, a good time to think and start new projects. I discovered with great pleasure his element, his universe and this nascent perplexity in front of his works. I liked it very much but I did not give an immediate answer as the period was not really suitable for the integration of a new artist. One week later Raoul P. Brosseau called me, I felt a joy of life, a complete and complex journey and a real desire to establish a relationship of trust. The decision was made immediately and despite this period that was nailing us to the house, we wanted to start this new collaboration without delay while waiting to meet each other.

2020, exhibition

Agnès Doneau was born in 1967 in Angers. From her childhood, precursor signs manifested, foreshadowing an exceptional artistic journey that would mark her life and open horizons laden with a past to rewrite. The artist shared with us the very first "sign": "On that day, the weather was splendid at the beginning of November. I was playing on the porch when suddenly I heard the announcement of Pasolini's assassination on the radio. The journalist's voice is still vivid in my memory. I was eight years old. I stopped for a few seconds and felt the weight of generations, a feeling of death difficult to explain... 'a bit of time in its pure state.'"

As a child, Agnès Doneau spent her time scrutinizing the faces of those around her in search of what she calls "a little moment of truth." Initiated by her mother into drawing, colors, and the beauty of things, she also received a precious legacy from her two grandfathers, the cinematic image. The discovery of Pasolini's work at the age of 15 was a real shock and had a considerable impact on her life and graphic work.

Agnès Doneau pursued studies in fine arts to perfect her technique and continued with art history as part of an ERASMUS project that allowed her to discover the restoration site of the Duomo di Firenze, which was a "revelation" for her. She then specialized in painting restoration at the International University of Restoration in Florence and later passed the aggregation. Her profession as an art restorer allowed her to travel not only to splendid countries like Italy and the Middle East but also, for about twenty years, inside a painting, a fresco, to discover a story, the traces of thought in action, and thus engage in a conversation spanning centuries.

The ultra-fine brush of a Restorer No. 1 gave way to a spalter, allowing her to throw herself body and soul into immense canvases and devote herself more to painting.

Sensitive to Kierkegaard's notion of "repetition," her paintings in the first series of bodies seize the drawings of the Renaissance and Mannerism to infuse them with another life in a timeless space. It is no longer the drawing that takes precedence but indeed the painting, the gesture... This notion of repetition is beautiful because it affirms that the past experience is always a possibility. There is a reprise; the present seizes the past and the future... this timelessness is not reached through a nostalgic return to a bygone past but through a movement towards the future, a projection forward, a "remembering forward."

The choice of her subjects generally stems from an emotional, cinematographic, musical, literary shock, such as Gaudé's Eldorado, which was the trigger - a true awakening to the world - for her series on "Exiles." Literature anticipated what she would discover with horror in Sicily during a project. This vision of lost, stunned men has haunted her, making her realize that art in general cannot abstract itself from the tremors of the world...

"I see literature and restoration as an immense palimpsest, the world's memory, an infinite and dizzying sequence of quotations, permutations, recreations, reinterpretations, successive interventions across time."

Other sources of inspiration, such as the opening credits of Andrei Tarkovsky's "Ivan's Childhood," Kafka's works, films by Kurosawa, Dreyer, Erice, Kiarostami, Welles, Sokourov, Fellini, P. Pasolini, the Taviani brothers, or Nemec's striking film "Diamond Wedding," were the origin of a series on "movement" - the escape related to migrants... all sharing a poetic and spiritual power, where choreography, ritual, and ceremony are omnipresent.

For Agnès Doneau, expressiveness does not only come through representation but through plasticity, gesturality. The gesture reveals itself, adds a dimension, an additional meaning to the painting. The rapid, nervous gesture emphasizes movement, direct action on the canvas without a sketch, allowing her to get to the essential. "What fascinates me is the staging, how the canvases respond to each other. The images are assembled like sequences, shots to recreate a dynamic whole, a sort of timeless ballet transcribed in the pictorial field."

The signs: "To tell you that my life has been scattered with small signs that I have more or less captured. In Venice in 1990, I feel this moment of eternity facing the Correr Museum; six years later, I restore the frescoes and trompe l'oeil of the Museum... The day after the Fenice fire in 1996, I still feel that time weighing on me as I look at the window opening onto emptiness. In 2002, I restored the decorative ornament of the Theater... I could multiply examples."

Some restorations:

Hagia Sophia – Istanbul – Turkey (Mosaics)
The Great Mosque of the Umayyads – Syria (Mosaics)
Villa of the Mysteries – Pompeii (Frescoes)
Museo S. Marco – Florence
Palazzo Medici-Riccardi – Florence
Museo Correr – Venice
Teatro della Fenice – Venice

Exhibitions:

Gallery 360 Florence "Literature and Cinema" - Florence
Temple of Taste "The Exiles" Nantes
Contemporary Art Center 'One Way' Angers
Fine Arts Museum/Palais de l'Europe "The Aesthetics of the Body" - Menton
Depardieu Gallery "Urban Solitude" - Nice
Contemporary Art Center "Conversation on Homer" Angers

Discover the eXhibition 2024 at Bouillon d'art - Bordeaux

Gallery Words

In September 2023, Agnès Doneau sent me an email to introduce me to her work. From the first look at her catalog, I held my breath, wondering what the next page could still reveal to me. Dynamism, music, score, literature—her plastic work has great musicality, strong messages that carry me away through the works. I contacted her by phone, excited about the idea of representing her. Everything is simple; as a humanist artist, she is in perfect harmony with her work, and there is a genuine desire for collaboration on both sides. I proposed an exhibition with sculptor Val Carr-Ortolan in January 2024. Both artists marvel at each other's works and are delighted to exhibit together. The harmony is perfect, and Agnès enters the gallery for our greatest pleasure.

Florian Eymann, a self-taught French artist born 1980, began by exploring the world of music for several years before practicing the pictorial art for which he is now recognized in France and internationally. Florian is identifiable by his oil paintings where he explores dark themes and experiments with form and content by deconstructing and reinterpreting faces and expressions of traditional portraiture.
Taking inspiration from the light of Caravaggio, the deformations of Bacon, the freedom of sight of Picasso and many others; Eymann developed a particular gestural methodology. By merging shapes and bright colours, the artist deliberately portrays a constant impression of construction/destruction.
His work makes the viewer discover that the representational standards can transcend by strategically incorporating abstract touches of paint which partially camouflage the work and thus letting the imagination be carried away.

The gallery's words

I discovered Florian's work on social media. What immediately struck me was this reference to great artists without actually referring to them. A great freedom of interpretation, a constantly evolving construction which never finds its final form, close to this precipice of chaos, the artist never tipping into the abyss. We traded on several occasions but Florian, caught up in the American market, could not be represented in France. The confinement will have finally served the gallery since the artist has entrusted us with his representation in Bordeaux.

Born in 1980 in Lille, Hellen Halftermeyer did not first consider sharing her artworks as an artist, as if the mere fact of living her life was in itself an artistic act rather disheveled and often unconventional.

Not long ago, it clicked, doing Art of Living was no longer enough, she now concentrates her creative energy on the creation of sensitive works in which the human figure is preeminent and more recently the animal world and in particular the birds that she enjoys observing every day.
No matter the medium, there is a closeness in the way she paints and carves. Expressionist deconstruction of academic codes, sometimes furious, emanates tension and emotion.

The gallery's words

We discovered Hellen Halftermeyer's paintings in 2017. The  aroused emotions were so strong that we quickly contacted the artist. After some interesting exchanges about her very personal approach to painting we were convinced to present her work in the gallery. A first meeting with the artist, followed a few months later by an artistic proposal, gave meaning to our future collaboration. In April 2018, the first paintings of Hellen arrived and it was a real pleasure to discover these works of extreme sensitivity. Hellen joins the artists of the gallery and brings a feminine touch, mysterious, deep, to the intense work already presented in gallery. In perfect harmony with the spirit of the gallery we follow her work with great interest.

Michel Lagrange wrote a poem "Mysterious" inspired by a work by Hellen
"Appearance passage between two of life
Moving universe
Spiritual stained glass
Without the partitions of a low-level lead
In this great ocean dream
A woman's impression evanescent
Emerge ... "

Discover 2023 exhibition

Discover 2019 exhibition

The gallery's words

The gallery’s words

Born in 1964 in Montélimar, Pascal Marcel is a self-taught artist. He began exhibiting his work in 1980. It was in 1993 that he decided to devote himself entirely to painting, moving towards abstract work. He then turned to figurative art during his 5-year stay in Mexico, where he took part in numerous exhibitions. He came back full of bright, warm colours. Emotion is at the heart of Pascal Marcel's work. His canvases act like a magnet, while preserving our freedom of interpretation.  Man is often at the centre of his work, but more and more he is talking to us about nature. Colour is a profound counterbalance to the subject of his paintings, giving another dimension to the work and to the emotion it arouses in us. Pascal Marcel reveals himself to be a true pictorial poet. Representing people, humanity and their environment, he has no difficulty in conveying a wide range of universal emotions.

The words of the gallery

I discovered the works of Pascal Marcel a few years ago on a show. The extraordinary palette of colors holds the attention, then the magic operates. A great sensitivity, scenes of daily life, tenderness, curiosity, everything is mixed in us and the look continues to be lost in the work.
It took more than 6 years for us to finally meet and make you discover his work.
Sincere and very kind, the artist reveals a part of him through a prism, situations put in paintings that question us. We invite you to dive without restraint into the world of Pascal Marcel.

The gallery's words

After looking for his own path for a long time, Nicolas Monjo discovered painting at the age of twenty. Selfthaught, he developed his own technique  and allows him to play with the medium, offering a very personal style. The human figure is at the center of his work. His subjects often evolve in fantastic univers, and are not without any resemblance to the society and the world around us.
The characters are locked up, crushed by the frame of the painting, they present a difficulty which makes us leave our condition, of the transcendence, in a violent and anxiogenic society which does not always allow us to break free. The "dominant / dominated" relationship is often evoked and the recurring figure of fish here is the ultimate expression. A palette of soft and dark color at the same time, creates a singular atmosphere.

The words of the gallery

Nicolas Monjo contacted  the gallery to present his artworks. I immediately perceived his technicality and went straight into his world. Seduced by the subject and his vision of the world, his artworks touched me. The first encounter with the artist, friendly and simple, achieved to convince me. Nicolas Monjo is genuine and sincere in his work, he does not really explain what led him to paint but recognizes the absolute necessity to create. With a true artistic soul, he prefers to stay in his studio and let others talk about his work. Nicolas brings a different touch in the gallery and joins the artists with a marked identity and a beautiful personality.

The gallery’s words

Expressionist artist, Joëlle Rousselet is a link revealer. Her work highlights what unites man and nature. « It’s a Landscape of souls where a score is played, at once mineral and organic, human and animal ». To look at his characters and faces are at the same time material, temporality and history. Like the archaeologist discovering the human remains that reveal his history to the world, the viewer delights in this plunge into the source of life. Joëlle Rousselet paints the connections, the movement, the molts. It plays an emotional back and forth between the elements of nature and its creations, a way to connect with the « living ».

The gallery's words

I discovered the paintings of Joëlle Rousselet during an art Fair in 2020, She was exhibited by a colleague whose artistic sensivity I appreciate. Immersed in the « soul » of one of her paintings exhibited I had the chance to meet the artist. Joëlle has a great sensitivity and humility, and she speaks of her work with great simplicity and reserve. In 2021 Joëlle joins the artists of the gallery !


2022, exhition