The Galerie des Barmes, discover artist Fabien Verschaere

The Galerie des Barmes is a new contemporary art space, created in 2022 within Les Barmes de l’Ours hotel, in Val d’Isère, in collaboration with Jerome Neutres, and with a scenography by Christophe Mattis. This place open to all audiences presents each year an original exhibition by an artist selected by Jerome Neutres. In December 2022, Corine Borgnet presented a set of contemporary vanities under the title Endless Supper, sculptures made from poultry bones and Jesmonite specially created for the event. Fabien Verschaere succeeds him this season with Polar Tales which brings together around fifty works in different media, including several created for the exhibition in relation to the theme of the mountain and its imaginations.

POLAR TALES

FABIEN VERSCHAERE

 7 December 2023 – 14 April 2024

As Miro said he paints the color of his dreams when he wakes up, Fabien Verschaere could say that he draws the lines of the imaginations of his daydreams. Like the great Catalan master, Verschaere has invented a visual language of his own, with figures and signs which replace the mimetic representation of reality with the expression of another possible world.

In his story-paintings, Fabien, poet of the fantastic as well as painter of marvelous fables, tells us stories of bears and fairies, angels and devils, castles and chimeras, which transport us into the fascinating fourth dimension of his dreams, which sometimes reveals itself to be a distorted mirror of ours. “Transforming the world into a legend”, as he puts it, is the artistic project of Fabien Verschaere (born in 1975 in Vincennes, Val-de-Marne) who has established himself for thirty years as one of the most important figures, most original and most international of the French contemporary art scene.

Exhibited and collected at a very young age in numerous French museums, including those of Lyon and Saint-Etienne, at the Palais de Tokyo and the Grand Palais, the artist trained at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris has also won over an audience in America and Asia where he is regularly shown (especially in Korea). He was selected to create a monumental work on the ceiling of the Olympic village for the 2024 Games in Paris.

This exhibition brings together a selection of recent works, mixing several supports and mediums (oil on wood, paint on metal, felt on canvas…) which constitute so many challenges that the artist gives himself to stimulate his virtuosity and make him invent new variations of his visual language so singular – sometimes disturbing, always fascinating.

Jerome Neutres, exhibition curator