
We are pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of French painter Michel Perot in our gallery in Carouge. He will show his recent drawings and woodcuts.Michel Perot received his degree from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris in 2008. In the ten years since, he has worked successively through several techniques: oil painting, charcoal, ballpoint pen, watercolor, and more recently, woodcuts. When he feels he is “grieving for color,” Perot solemnly returns to it. He alternates these techniques. An extremely gifted artist, Perot appropriates the fundamentally classic subject of landscape and challenges his skills by generating an array of contingent and destabilizing parameters. He tasks himself to be more instinctive than cerebral. He avoids preparatory drawings. He reduces his range of colors. He pushes these techniques to the extreme. He uses nearly unreasonable formats and avails himself of offbeat or invented tools. Everything is an opportunity to evoke a certain discomfort when faced with the work—a search for immediacy, at the edge of a tipping point. A performing member of the artist’s group, Les Soirées dessinées, Michel Perot appears to have set aside his large format work. His woodcuts are worked up to the very edges of their 120 x 40 cm size and demand a performative energy that takes us far from the image of the solitary painter in his studio.