Contemporary art gallery

The Galerie des Barmes is a new contemporary art space, created in 2022 within the hotel Les Barmes de l’Ours, in Val d’Isère, in collaboration with Jérôme Neutres, and with scenography by Christophe Mattis. Each year, this venue, open to all, will present an original exhibition by an artist selected by Jérôme Neutres. In December 2022, Corine Borgnet presented a set of contemporary vanities under the title Endless Supper, sculptures fashioned from poultry bones and Jesmonite specially created for the event. In 2023, Fabien Verschaere’s Polar Tales brought together some fifty works in a variety of media, including several created for the exhibition in relation to the theme of mountains and their imaginary worlds. This season, he is succeeded by the artist Elzevir.

SNOW IS A COLOR

ELZEVIR

Exhibition until April 15, 2025

SNOW IS A COLOR presents a series of original works by artist Elzevir (Saint-Etienne, 1966), many of which were created for the exhibition. Watercolors on paper, gouaches on canvas and oils on wood: Elzevir uses a variety of media to transcribe his notes and impressions of the world of skiing. He approaches his vision like an anthropologist with a paintbrush, focusing as much on the characters as on the gestures, clothing and accessories that define the society of skiers. What these genre scenes and still lifes have in common is their rejection of anecdote and superficial narrative temptation. By concentrating on his subjects, who have become solitary objects stripped of all appearances, Elzevir’s painting, which is the antithesis of a “showing off” aesthetic, sometimes takes purity to the extreme, as if to demonstrate that the banal is never that banal – as long as we take the time to look at it. In these “pieces of paint” that praise the subject, deliberately erasing any element of context, the artist presents us with drawings of a gentle poetry that sometimes becomes strange, almost fantastic. To make them even more distinctive, Elzévir isolates his subjects on large white backgrounds that often take up most of the space in the work. He uses different papers and supports according to the quality of their respective whites. In this way, the artist also manages to treat the subtleties and variations of snow colors in a surprising way. A former student at the Saint-Etienne School of Fine Arts, Elzevir still lives and works in the region. His work has been exhibited in several art centers and galleries in France and Europe, as well as in Morocco, Mexico, India and the United States.

Jérôme Neutres, commissaire de l’exposition