SAINT-ANDRÉ-DU-BOIS.- After the Nobuyoshi Araki/Daido Moriyama exhibitions, the Théâtre de la vie (Summer-Autumn 2017) and then Nicolas Delas - Costumes (Winter 2017), Jérémy Demester (born 1988) is presenting his work in the Grande Galerie of the Château from 21 April to 24 June 2018. Demester takes an experimental approach to art, painting in oil, on bronze, in abstract and figurative styles, using each as a potential means to give form to the light on a landscape, biographical event and a spirituality tinged with esotericism. He draws on the history of art - including ancient statues - and sometimes reinterprets stereotypical representations to examine which elements make an image likely to survive through the centuries.

This latest exhibition is a digression, a pause, an oscillation between several different worlds which are explored through ten or so paintings and a sculpture in the Grande Galerie at Malromé. This is a timeless journey.

The voyage begins with the Musée d’Orsay and its painters, like Jean-François Millet, whose talent for depicting the reality of rural life and the lives of peasants in the 19th century, is rivalled only by his grasp of the recurring symbolic and timeless elements of pastoral life. An artist who gleaned his understanding from his daily immersion in the very natural world these peasants laboured to domesticate.

For Demester, the uncontrollable forces of the earth erupt in this antique ager - territory - which is both a public and sacred space. The trees stand like hermae, a demonic and purifying fire spreads through the countryside, and when the breast of a foolhardy woman suddenly appears, it brings with it the erotic languor of a hot summer’s day spent in the shade of tall trees.

Although we have forgotten all of this - the deities of field and forest, the unchanging rhythm of the days and moons - there are still places where nothing changes. There was the Orsay, but there were also repeated journeys to Africa. Time, climate and voodoo gods that did their work. Over there, the artist sensed eternity again, to such an extent that time no longer exists, or at least not in a unique form, since it passes at different rhythms depending on the place where you find yourself. Painting, more than any other medium – with its history stretching back thousands of years, and the sedimentation time needed for its emergence – allows us to grasp its expansion and distortion, and to manipulate its elastic matter. This varying time fuels a contemplative life, one attached to the beauty of simple moments and things, of which we nevertheless measure the eminent fragility. This vision of life is particularly well expressed in these verses from The Last Poem, dictated by Fernando Pessoa on the day of his death:

“It may be the last day of my life,
I have saluted the sun by raising my right hand,
But I didn’t salute the sun in farewell,
I showed it that I liked seeing it again. Nothing else.”

Jérémy Demester was born in 1988, in Digne. A graduate of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, he has shown his work in Paris, Berlin, Rome and Benin. The Musée d’art moderne in Saint-Étienne devoted a solo exhibition to him in 2016. From 24 August to 4 November, he will take part in La Littorale - the 7th Contemporary Art Biennale in Anglet. Jérémy Demester is represented by the Max Hetzler gallery in Berlin/Paris.

The curator : Richard Leydier