With this new exhibition, gallery Annne Barrault pays a tribute to pictorial art through the works of five unique artists. Though quite different, their works are confronted, hence various conceptions of painting are shown.

Dominique Figarella offers a transverse and experimental view of it. For this French artist, three characters –the picture, the space where it is exhibited, and the viewer- interact and create a silent dialogue, an artistic experience. And the picture itself is made up as the evidence of the experiment, whatever the techniques or the materials used.

As for Roland Topor’s works, there are few of them, and little known. However, painted shortly before he died, they reveal a new face of the artist. As a matter of fact, he repeatedly refers to his original background, and his work looks like the return to childhood, questioning the reason why the son of a Polish painter did not start painting before the end of his life.

Guillaume Pinard has an ambiguous relationship with painting, both respectful and derisive, as can be seen in the works exhibited here. The artist seems to abandon himself to introspection, and, with apparently instantaneous effervescent colours and shapes, he invites the viewer to look, in the same manner as you try to find a way, a thought.

Covering a surprising historical period, Alun Williams plays on the abstract evocations and the wellknown figures of Art History.

From a muse of the Renaissance to a tribute to Picabia, from Raphael to the clever use of a paint stain, the artist stages his compositions, and gives them a new powerful shape and a true evocative strength.

Heidi Wood looks at peri-urban areas, and paints them in a pictographic way. Totally affectless, the precise figures by the Australian artist make you think about suburbs and the phenomenon of social exclusion to be found in these geographic zones.

These different artistic ways offer, with the same medium, a plural view, and enable, at the same time, through confrontation, to combine the differences and to propose, not a definition, but the reflection of present painting, still alive and creative.