Gilles Drouault, galerie / multiple

Gilles Drouault gallery/multiples is proud to participate for the first time in Drawing Now. And we are equally proud to present, for this participation, one of the cartoonists, and artists, the most talented and interesting of the contemporary art scene, Stéphane Calais. His particpation at the last Biennale de Lyon, for example, demonstrated the power of his know-how, which he likes (almost) undoing in his confrontation with experimentation. Stéphane Calais paints and draws faces, clouds, hands, flowers, crabs, rounds, squares, lines... in an immediate and swift action that names the world more than it describes or represents it. To name, not to designate or to have it meant, but to abolish the distance between the world and the individual who perceives it. It is not that the drawing takes on the function here of appointment, it is that it gives us to see what, in the flower, the bird, the vegetable, remains in us, like an imprint, when the event of their vision has disappeared. Drawing here is not representing (presenting again) but inventing (and thus grasping) the grace of the world as it happens to us in its simplest, most ordinary elements.