Échappée is an paintings’ exhibition with Dorian Cohen, Marie Dupuis, Amandine Maas and Lise Stoufflet. Between reality and fiction this exhibition gives us a break from our own reality, too absurd and complex to grasp. Échappée – A pair of legs, half bodies passing through the window at night. Do you want to explore or do you have an instinct for survival? (Escape, Lise Stoufflet, 2020) Lise Stoufflet’s paintings have something that keeps us at a distance and at the same time pushes us to introspection. A disturbing uni-verse in which we like to linger. An atmosphere that can be found in Magritte’s paintings, but which makes us want to throw everything away, even if the world outside seems darker. A darkness that we find in Dorian Cohen’s paintings. It is first of all the feeling of being in front of a banal and everyday scene, an indoor scene, in the kitchen, at mealtimes. Then as we enter the picture we realise that we are far from reality. A chiaroscuro of artificial lights loads the atmosphere with a stifling solitude (Untitled, Dorian Cohen, 2020). Échappée – Like a thought in motion, an irrepressible desire to change things and to break codes. Like the performative paintings of Amandine Maas, who plays with composition and the classic still-life genre by reinventing every day the painting at the heart of the gallery (Still Life (1) (2) (3), 2019). Movement and spontaneity that can also be found in the fragments of Marie Dupuis. Small formats that punctuate the space and resonate with each of the works pre-sented. We catch a memory here, acclimatise ourselves to a sensation there, start laughing at the deformation of this dog that we picture euphorically at the idea of playing with its owner (Crazy Melchi, 2020). We construct our own story at the heart of the exhibition. Échappée is what it’s all about: atmosphere, movement, illusion, characters, interiors, scenes of life. So many possibilities to build our own story from all these fragments of narration. It’s the freedom to take a step aside and the time for a moment escape, we too can escape from our own reality.

 

Elodie Bernard