NAOFUMI MARUYAMA – PUDDLE

Posted on 2025-12-22

The exhibition features fifteen new paintings and an equal number of works on paper, in which Maruyama deepens his poetic exploration of fluidity and perception. His paintings are created on damp cotton canvases, allowing pigment to flow freely. The paint seeps into the fabric, evaporates, leaves traces, blurs again. The image emerges not through delineation but through dispersion — a process that recalls the ‘Morotai’ style (misty or vague), where gradations of color replaced the line drawings characteristic of traditional Japanese painting, but also the stain paintings of Morris Louis or Helen Frankenthaler from the postwar American Color Field movement.

In Maruyama’s work, there are no hard lines, no fixed contours. Everything breathes and blends. Mountains dissolve into rivers, rivers into air, air into memory. His paintings seem to hover between appearing and disappearing, like reflections on a water surface that ripple and fade at the slightest touch.

Opposite – Kicking Water (therefore), 2025

Exhibition runs through to December 10th, 2025

Keteleer Gallery
Pourbusstraat 3 – 5
2000 Antwerp
Belgium

keteleer.com

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NINA JAYASURIYA – ODYSSÉE DE YAKA VILLA

Posted on 2025-12-22

“All the images will disappear”

The opening lines of Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux’s novel, Les Années [The Years], appear like an acknowledgement but act like a warning. It reminds us that nothing is ensured, that images disintegrate, that memories become hazy and places undergo changes. What remains is not faithful to the past, it cannot be for the passage of time has made it cease to exist and transformed it into memory. The past is the persistence of an unstable matter that escapes our hold and which, however, we constantly try to take hold of.

It is from that primordial instability that Nina Jayasuriya built her exhibition “L’Odyssée de Yaka Villa”: an exploration of what happens when images are removed, of what is forgotten or remains, disappears or is transmitted. Yaka Villa existed once: it was the first name of the hotel set up in Sri Lanka by the artist’s father in the family home at the beginning of the 2000s.

Opposite – La chute des anges rebelles, 2025

Exhibition runs through to December 8th, 2025

Mennour
5, rue du Pont de Lodi
75006 Paris
France

mennour.com

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ALBERTO GIACOMETTI – TOUT N’EST QUE DESSIN

Posted on 2025-12-22

Obsessed with drawing, Giacometti never ceased, throughout his life, to engage hand and gaze in his attempt at capturing the elusive reality of beings and things. From his training years to his mature works, drawing occupied a central and daily place: whether he worked with a model, copied the old masters or drew from memory, he constantly went back to that fundamental practice. “What needs to be said, what I believe is that, whether it concerns sculpture or painting, only drawing counts,” he wrote.

Trained at a young age in the studio of his father Giovanni Giacometti, a post-impressionist painter, Alberto Giacometti learned to observe and convey reality with a stroke. In his sketchbooks dating from his student days in Geneva, at La Grande Chaumière with Antoine Bourdelle, then, after the Second World War, in the cafés of Montparnasse or in the studio of rue Hippolyte-Maindron, he drew relentlessly: objects, faces, passers-by, fragments of the world. Drawing is where the most acute tension between the visible and the gaze, between the being and its appearance, between presence and distance takes place.

Opposite – Tête d’homme, 1961

Exhibition runs through to December 10th, 2025

Mennour
28, avenue Matignon
75008 Paris
France

mennour.com

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