"DOUCE FRAYEUR" - 16 Rue des Quatre Fils, Paris

SLAG&RX is pleased to announce Alexandre Rochegaussen’s first solo exhibition at RX&SLAG Paris, curated by designer and interior architect Pierre Yovanovitch, a leading figure in contemporary design.

Celebrated for his sensitive, architectural approach to design, Pierre Yovanovitch has established an aesthetic that is both understated and sculptural, deeply rooted in dialogue with the visual arts. His projects, spanning Europe and the United States, demonstrate a constant attentiveness to materials, light, and the singularity of the creators he chooses to support. For this exhibition at RX&SLAG, he highlights the pictorial universe of Alexandre Rochegaussen, an artist whose work he has followed and championed for several years.

Their collaboration is not new: in 2020 and 2021, at Yovanovitch’s invitation, Rochegaussen created the ceiling for the “Chef’s Table” at Hélène Darroze’s restaurant in The Connaught hotel in London, as well as the ceiling of a bedroom at the Château de Fabrègues. In 2023/2024, at the designer’s request, he produced an installation in Marie-Laure de Noailles’s bedroom at Villa Noailles to mark the institution’s centenary. Each of these projects reveals the shared sensibility and close rapport between an artist and a designer who both cultivate spaces inhabited by imagination.

Text by Pierre YovanovitchText Yovanovitch

There is in Alexandre Rochegaussen a singular way of letting painting approach the living, while allowing the living to signal back to us. His animals are not subjects to be represented, but presences that the canvas brings forth without warning. They appear to us suddenly, with that energy and urgency that precede language: a tremor, a restlessness, at times a violence too, an innocence and a softness that merge. These are figures that tremble, leap, fight, tip over, bite, devour one another, watch us while laughing, hide, hesitate. They look at us as much as they slip away from us. Their unease is vital. 

When I discovered his work about ten years ago, the painting unfolded through a drawn gesture full of great nervous tension, with instinctive lines. Everything, then, happened very quickly. The sheet of Japanese paper or thick cardboard was crossed in haste, as if in mid-air, as though trying to catch something on the fly before it vanished. There were many instruments of capture. The ground slipped away beneath the house. The figures tore themselves apart. The painter hurled his lines over the void.

Since then, a profound transformation has taken place. The gesture has calmed without ever stiffening; the forms have grown clearer and more substantial without relinquishing their fleeting unease. The protagonists have taken on full presence. The anxiety remains, but it has shifted: no longer contained solely in the freehand movement of the drawing, it now inhabits the image itself, the scene it sets forth and the particular way it leaves us hanging in suspense.

Rochegaussen’s animals are mediators. They are neither symbols, nor metaphors, nor illustrations. They are thresholds. They place us before an older part of ourselves, a place where emotion had not yet separated from instinct. The painter does not tell stories; he opens territories. And in these skies, something fragile moves through a shared unease, a vulnerability laid bare.

This exhibition marks a milestone not a rupture, but an achievement. An opening. It shows what endures and what shifts. It bears witness to an ongoing relationship between the painter’s hand, the world he observes, and the human animal who becomes his silent interlocutor. 

What is at play here is a way of inhabiting fragility not as weakness, but as sharpness and strength. A way of being in the world while remaining permeable, open, and attuned to what trembles. 

I am pleased to accompany this exhibition. Because Alexandre Rochegaussen’s work never ceases to remind me that we too are beings crossed by forces we do not always master, presences searching for their place, bodies moving forward with hesitation in a world that is constantly shifting. 

- Pierre Yovanovitch