July 2026 – Galerie Art Concept

Vue d’exposition / Installation view Pierre Bellot, Vallée FM, Art : Concept, Paris. Courtesy the Artist and Art : Concept, Paris
Photo : Objets pointus

Pierre Bellot, Sans titre, 2026. Huile sur toile / Oil on canvas. 26 × 27 cm (10 ¼ × 10 ⅝ inches). Courtesy the Artist and Art : Concept, Paris. Photo : Romain Darnaud

For this exhibition, I wanted to immerse myself entirely in abstraction—setting aside any notion of subject or image as a starting point for the painting. The aim was to lose myself in the painting itself: its surface, its color, the way tones play against one another.

Everything here begins with instinct—a gesture, a first chaotic sketch. What I’m after is a certain vibration, a specific texture, something matte and chalky. Through layer upon layer, I want the painting to arrive at a kind of harmony, a balance, a feeling. I’m chasing the accident, the unplanned moment.

This is slow work—studio time. Paintings can sit unresolved for weeks, caught between one state and the next. Some of the canvases are older pieces, years old, that I’ve gone back and painted over. They build up like geological strata. Where traces of earlier layers show through—the pentimenti—the painting lays bare its own history, its false starts and changes of direction.

What emerges are archipelagos of form: works that read like miniature landscapes, fragments of cities, unfinished maps, or pieces of a wall. And somewhere along the way, an image appears unbidden—the trace of a place, a memory. That’s what ends up naming the painting.

—Pierre Bellot, 2026

Opening: Thursday, September 3, 2026 from 6pm.

Ulla von Brandenburg, *Sergueï Diaghilev*, 2009. Aquarelle et paillettes sur papier / Watercolor and glitter on paper. 147 x 114 cm. Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris. Donation de la Collection Florence et Daniel Guerlain, 2012

Echoing the major exhibition that the Latvian National Museum of Art devotes to the evolution of Latvian graphic arts since the 18th century, “Contemporary Drawings. Gifts and Donation from Florence and Daniel Guerlain to the Mnam” offers a counterpoint firmly focused on the international art scene. The exhibition presents internationally renowned artists such as Robert Longo, Kiki Smith, Marlene Dumas, Giuseppe Penone…, as well as French artists such as Henri Cueco, Dove Allouche, Anne Marie Schneider…, most of whom have never been shown in the Baltic countries.
The selection of nearly one hundred works on paper highlights a diversity of approaches, techniques, and formats characteristic of contemporary drawing practice by the artists, as well as of the body of work formed by the gifts successively made to the Musée national d’art moderne since 2006 by the French collector couple, Florence and Daniel Guerlain.

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