Exhibition at Galerie St-Hilaire

The gallery St-Hilaire presents MÉMOIRE VIVE, an exhibition dedicated to French artist Jean-François DUBREUIL, featuring a collection of paintings that are emblematic of his artistic approach, in a wide variety of formats.Opening reception on Thursday, May 8 at 6:00 PM in the presence of the artistAt the origin of every painting by Dubreuil lies a newspaper, a headline from the printed press. The artist transposes the newspaper—a familiar and widely circulated object—onto the canvas as vivid-colored surfaces or diagonals, erasing all content: headlines, journalistic text, photographs, advertisements, weather reports, and TV listings. This prompted art critic Jean-Claude Le Gouic to aptly remark of Dubreuil’s work: “Everything to see, nothing to read!”Layout, compositional grid, editorial spaces, number of pages—all these structural components of the newspaper are strictly adhered to and faithfully rendered according to a defined scale, reflecting the reality of the original medium. Yet, through his uniquely developed analytical grid for each work, the artist shifts this material base toward a non-figurative and fundamentally pictorial representation. Beyond his conceptual process, Dubreuil remains deeply committed to the core principles of painting and its physical elements—such as stretcher bars, brushes, canvases, and homemade paint mixtures—and firmly asserts a practice rooted in painting itself.Born in 1946 in Tours (France), Jean-François Dubreuil lives and works in Paris.In 1975, together with a group of painters, he co-founded an artist-run gallery, Galerie 30, which he co-directed until its closure in 1987. Artists such as Vera Molnár, Marcel Alocco, and Pierrette Bloch exhibited there.In 2015, he was invited to take part in the conference “The Artistic Futures of Information” organized by the University of Paris 2.His work is well represented in the Albers-Honegger Donation, held at the Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux (France), and in 2016 he was awarded the Aurélie Nemours Prize.Since 2013, he has been represented in Switzerland by the gallery St-Hilaire.