La maison rouge is proud to present the first monographic exhibition featuring Jérôme Zonder’s work to be held in Paris. The show will run from February 19 to May 10, 2015.

For more than ten years, Jérôme Zonder (b. 1974 in Paris) has been developing a body of work of great virtuosity, centered on drawings. Primarily executed in lead pencil and charcoal, often in large formats, his works elicit admiration yet contain elements of fright.

References to Albrecht Dürer, Robert Crumb, Rembrandt, Charles Burns, Otto Dix and Walt Disney appear cheek by jowl in narrative compositions that are often cruel: «Narrative draws us into a drawing – the only thing holding us back is our physicality. When I draw, I am poised between distance and proximity, figuration and abstraction, attraction and repulsion.»

Jérôme Zonder has conceived his exhibition at la maison rouge as a perambulation, inviting visitors to step inside a world of drawings. They cover the floors and walls, creating a spatial and mental pathway that reflects the artist’s preoccupations.

«In 2009, I thought I’d detected a palpable increase in violence. I began a series featuring invented millennial nine-year-olds. I explored the theme of the birthday party and had my children play out recent news events marked by violence, childhood, cruelty and love.» Today, his millennials are teens. After childhood, with its terrors and nightmares, comes adolescence, an age of internal upheaval, metamorphosis, realizations and uncertainties. Poetic and dark, the scenes in this series highlight the violence and tragedy erupting in individual lives and on the grand scale of history. They also have the stylistic immediacy of a child’s drawing and demonstrate the prowess of his technique. Many questions arise: How should we interpret these images? What is our relationship with the everyday violence around us and what kind of witnesses do we make?