"CARNETS OUVERTS" - 16 Rue des Quatre Fils, Paris

For the new season, RX&SLAG gallery is devoting an exhibition to Joanne Boyer, bringing together a selection of drawings and paintings on paper. Entitled Carnets ouverts, the exhibition offers an opportunity to discover a lesser-known aspect of her practice and to observe, through more intimate formats, the way in which a visual vocabulary first associated with her painting takes shape.

Born in Versailles in 1990, Joanne Boyer has developed, over the past several years, a figurative practice in which light plays a definitive role. Her figures, landscapes, and architectures often emerge from the shadows, illuminated in fragments. This use of chiaroscuro places her painting within a long artistic tradition, from Caravaggio to Goya, from which she draws not so much on their forms as on their ability to make light a fundamental principle in the construction of an image.

The works presented in Carnets ouverts shift this relationship. On paper, the gesture becomes more direct, sometimes more immediate, while retaining something of the moment in which an image first appears. Yet drawing and gouache are not simply preparatory stages for a painting to come. They form an autonomous body of work, another space of experimentation in which motifs can emerge, be revisited, transformed, or abandoned.

The format itself alters the relationship to the work. Where painting establishes a scene, these sheets invite closer observation. Yet the same repertoire can be found here: ruined landscapes, forests, architectures, sirens, satyrs, knights, isolated figures, alongside much more contemporary elements. Joanne Boyer thus allows several temporalities to coexist without seeking to arrange or reconcile them. Mythology, art history, personal imagination, and fragments of everyday life all belong to the same world.

This coexistence is one of the driving forces of her practice. Her images sometimes seem to belong to a narrative, yet that narrative remains deliberately incomplete. They reveal neither its origin nor its conclusion. A few figures, a landscape, or a detail are enough to establish a situation from which something remains beyond our grasp. The half-light contributes to this uncertainty. Joanne does not merely conceal; she leaves the image open.

It would therefore be reductive to consider the notebooks as the intimate counterpart to her paintings. Rather, they offer a glimpse into another mode of working. Paper allows for experimentation, repetition, and accident; it accommodates forms that may eventually find their way into a painting, or remain as drawings in their own right. What emerges is less a glimpse into the secrecy of the studio than the continuous circulation of images within the artist’s practice.

With Carnets ouverts, RX&SLAG gallery has chosen to present a body of work rarely exhibited on its own, offering another way of approaching Joanne Boyer’s practice: not only through the immediacy of her paintings, but by moving closer to the place where her images first emerge and begin to take shape.