Jean-Gabriel Coignet & Antoine Perrot

Antoine Perrot and Jean-Gabriel Coignet know and mutually appreciate each other. This four-handed show features the work of painter Perrot, who tirelessly asks the question: how can an artist paint today?
And the exhibition also brings out the work of sculptor Coignet, whose mastery of technique has led him toward a refined form of sculpture.
Each, in his own way, undertakes an exploration concretely anchored in reality and everyday life.
Attentive to the colors of materials and ordinary, industrial objects, Perrot imports them into his compositions, underscoring the fact that he makes paintings from them. By incorporating pre-existing hues into his paintings—a process he calls ready-made-colors—he feels that his work embodies collective values. Pursuing this approach, he has taken the colors of printed fabrics as the basis of a new series, Au Peuple de Paris, which celebrates the diversity of the city’s many quarters—diverse cultures with diverse ideas, talents, and imaginative faculties.
Coignet, meanwhile, addresses technical constraints that he transforms into a challenge. That all his sculptures relate to statuary requires no proof. The sense of freedom and equilibrium behind the harmony and proportions of his work is the result of long study and exploration. It began with consideration of the impact of light on his series of opaque sculptures, followed by an approach to the dynamics of volume in space (the Ana series) and the effect of polychromy on construction (the Katarzyna series). Coignet’s works effectively incarnate a concrete presence, inhabiting both time and space.