PARIS.- The Art & Futur space at Galleria Continua invites all audiences to experience art and engage in dialogue with local communities. The gallery fosters exchanges between local actors and international networks, creating a platform for collectively imagining the present and future.

Welcoming Stéphanie Mansy into Galleria Continua’s spaces has once again brought attention to the dense and layered landscape surrounding the gallery. This is a place marked by the flow of the Grand Morin River, whose course has nourished human activities along its banks since the 14th century.

Mansy’s intervention traces these two parallel trajectories — human and natural, through a dual lens of documentary research and artistic exploration. Central to her approach is a profound interest in paper, which she uses as a true artistic medium, exploring its history, physical properties, limits, and possibilities. This curiosity led her to seek out remnants of industrial archaeology from the machines that once powered the former paper mill of Moulin de Boissy. Watermark rollers, mechanical components, archival photographs, and other artifacts from the collection of the Association des Compagnons Papetiers de Croëvecœur et du Marais are displayed as tangible witnesses of this industrial past, arranged in such a way as to formally engage with Mansy’s own artworks.

In contrast to the weight of the metal cylinders and the stillness of the photographs, Stéphanie Mansy’s vivid and tireless drawing lines lead our gaze beyond the walls of the Moulin, toward the natural elements that surround and animate it. On a single sheet of paper, multiple perspectives intertwine: from the closest details and organic textures to distant landscapes, sometimes suggested through negative space. “Through repetition, her gesture becomes mechanical, allowing a certain detachment or absence of self to emerge. This repetitive flow is punctuated by more contemplative moments where the line becomes image — a spark, a sudden flash of awareness.” 1

The vitality and tonal nuances of the Grand Morin landscape are captured with precision through on-site observation, followed by a process of reinterpretation in the studio. During this phase, Mansy experimented with various techniques: layering different kinds of paper, collaging, combining technical documents with book pages and drawings, using graphite and pigments, as well as aged, timeworn, and mold stained papers.

The result is a body of work that is both artistic and documentary in nature, revealing the complex stratigraphy of the Moulin de Boissy site where human presence and nature have, over the centuries, found a sense of balance and cohesion.

Stéphanie Mansy (1978) lives and works in the Oise region of France. She teaches at the Beauvais School of Art and the Faculty of Arts in Amiens. Currently represented by Galerie F in Senlis, she received the Carré sur Seine Prize in 2018, supported by the art galleries of Boulogne- Billancourt. In 2024, she was nominated for the Drawing Now Art Fair Prize.

Her drawings, engravings, and paintings express a powerful connection with nature, and especially with the history of the objects, spaces, and places she explores. Her artistic residencies in France and Spain continue to enrich her research into capturing suspended moments. Since 2002, she has published both solo and collaborative editions and regularly participates in workshops. Her work is held in collections such as FRAC Picardie, the Pilar and Joan Miró Foundation, and various private collections.


1: Elisabeth Piot, Lecturer in Visual Arts at the University of Picardie-Jules Verne