PARIS.- Xippas Gallery is presenting a solo exhibition by French artist Yvan Salomone, bringing together a selection of recent works. Mastering the watercolor technique with great precision, the artist transforms peri-urban sites into shifting landscapes of constant format. Presented in a rigorous hanging, the works create a space for reflection, inviting the viewer’s gaze to wander.
“A man moves by bicycle, by car, on foot. He roams through ports, outskirts, dunes, holiday residences, industrial zones. Sometimes he stops. A wall, a platform, a shed, a façade, or an isolated tree holds his attention. He experiences, delineates, traverses, and distills reality. A water tower cutting through the landscape like an aluminum vertebra, a faded toy-truck made monumental, a glass curtain invaded by a plant, two houses under construction becoming messengers of an intimate echo, a surface crushed by the autumn sun, dark despite its brilliance. These are simple objects, visible to all. Yet this ordinariness cracks, turns into a threshold, an enigma, a tipping point. It asserts itself. Before these blocks, ancient images rise up: battles, a flood, a tomb, a prayer, a hunting myth. The present scene changes status. Under the gaze it becomes a retention, a late variant of peripheral images. What is seen is caught in a chain. The watercolor work begins there. The format is always the same. The surface opens, yet remains measured. Certain areas are left bare. Rectangles, planes, paper reserves. Color advances patiently in successive layers. The chaos of the motif is held back, allowing another to appear, simpler, more legible. Light comes from what has been spared. The ‘I’ circulates: a child in a distant colony, a grandson in a kitchen, a reader of a book, an adult at the edge of a roundabout, a port, a beach, a parking lot. Memories of films and music cling to objects. At times, humor surfaces. Elsewhere, unease: flood, darkened horizon. Nothing is resolved. Objects remain partly mute. Images incomplete. Painting does not close the enigma. It merely organizes a space where reality, memory, light, and darkness meet, without conclusion.”
Y.S.
Yvan Salomone was born in 1957 in Saint-Malo, where he lives and works.
For over thirty years, Yvan Salomone has been painting enigmatic and refined landscapes using a rigorous mastery of watercolor. He transforms ordinary sites into floating images, where the depiction of raw materials — containers, concrete, steel
— confronts the lightness of the medium, giving these compositions their singular character.
The consistent format and the regularity of production are integral to his creative process. The titles of the works, composed of a series of numbers — the watercolor’s sequence followed by its date of execution — accompanied by a hybrid word, attest to this logic, as do the textual explorations, which are as significant as the pictorial
investigations. Yvan Salomone’s images present themselves to the viewer as suspended spaces.
His work has been exhibited in numerous prestigious institutions, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), MAC VAL (Museum of Contemporary Art of Val-de-Marne), the Cité de l’Architecture (Paris), the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Strasbourg, La Criée – Contemporary Art Center (Rennes), MAMCO (Geneva), Witte de With (Rotterdam), the Musée de La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland), as well as various FRACs.
Works by Yvan Salomone are held in public and private collections such as the Centre Pompidou, FMAC, MAC VAL (Museum of Contemporary Art of Val-de-Marne), the FRACs of Brittany, Upper Normandy, PACA, Picardy, Limousin, Poitou-Charentes, Île-de-France, Auvergne, Pays de la Loire, Languedoc-Roussillon, the Municipal Fund of the City of Paris, the Société Générale Collection, MAMCO (Geneva), the Museu Coleção Berardo (Lisbon), and Witte de With (Rotterdam).
