Crédit photos : Takeshi Sugiura

With historical ties to Impressionism and Fauvism to its credit, Maison Levanneur is hosting five artists who represent a form of contemporary continuation with their examination of pictorial and photographic subjectivity and the use of landscapes and cities as full fledged subjects. Given today’s torrent of images, it is more than ever essential to examine the fruitful tension that exists between the visible appearances of reality and its personal substance. The inaugural exhibition of Bessières Art Contemporain Gallery invites visitors to consider different levels of interpretation and to examine the truths that lay hidden “beyond appearances”.

With the American painter Christopher Kuhn, whose work is exhibited in the Solo Show room, surfaces and depths become a matrix. The disturbances that arise from his “painterly alchemy” represent molecular life here, recall cartography there, and elsewhere suggest organic shapes. What appears distant might in fact lie on the surface and vice versa.

With the Lebanese photographer Serge Najjar and the American performer-photographer Jackson Patterson engaging in a dialogue in the Project Space, the notion of appearance is examined through photography with a painterly dimension. Najjar proceeds like a goldsmith of cities as he shows their manifold geometric potential. Patterson includes "off-camera" memories in dreamlike landscapes that illustrate a location’s historic density with a performative process.

The In Progress section (the studio) has Swiss photographer-painter Alexis Reynaud and French draftsman-performer Octave Marsal examining the natural tension between “seeing” and “believing” in black and white.

Alexis Reynaud’s instinctive approach to photography and the astounding force of his images manifest the choice techniques he employs to give emphasis to form. His black and white photographs examine the natural tension between “seeing” and “believing”.

The images in negative of ski slopes captured on camera by Reynaud implicitly portray today's leisure society, while Octave Marsal, a whiz with pencils, makes virtuoso drawings in which he intermingles and superposes epochs and subjects.

Christopher Kuhn

American painter born in Chicago in 1977, Christopher Khun lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He is a graduate of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and from the American University of Paris with a B.A. in the history of art.

Serge Najjar

Serge Najjar is a Lebanese photographer born in Beyrouth Lebanon in 1973. He is a Doctor in Law, graduated from the University Panthéon-Assas in Paris.

Jackson Patterson

American photographer, born in 1975 Jackson Patterson received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009. Patterson lives and works in Chicago.

Octave Marsal

Octave Marsal is a French drawing artist born in 1990. In 2017, he graduated from the Royal College of Art in London with a Master of Arts. In 2014, he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London.

Alexis Reynaud

Alexis Reynaud is a swiss artist and photographer, born in 1975 in Geneva, Switzerland.