INTRODUCTION

Whitestone Gallery is thrilled to present our special group exhibition Windows of the Soul in celebration of the French May Arts Festival 2023, featuring artworks by French artists Marion Flament, Béchir Boussandel, Jean Marie Haessle, and Baptiste Tavernier. Windows of the Soul explores how artists see their mysterious and dream-like patterns, with them, they defy the dichotomous cosmology and relax its temporal and spatial laws. It also gives a glimpse of the landscape of the current or a historical era. As the artists freely express their truthful desire, dreams, and imaginations in interwoven compositions of peculiar figures, they bring out narratives of life that transcend time and space. Alongside realistic renditions, their creation came to a new attempt at spiritual explorations. For the viewers, these creative productions are openings to dreams, to the essence of arts, in which the window becomes an artistic witness to the brutalities or beauties occurring in the world. The possibilities are furthered in current times as we increasingly explore the outlooks of the future through windows and perspectives. 

Marion Flament

Marion Flament is a young artist born in 1989 in Reims and lives and works in Paris, France. Flament develops her work around everyday life experience by observing physical phenomena and sensations linked to our immediate environment to enquire about our space practice. Captivated by the poetic force of gesture, she invites us to encounter her artistic practice and materiality, echoing its underlying metaphysical resonances, by her one of a kind glass fossilization. Flament seeks to restore something intangible through light in her installations and sculptures. It was through her exploration of the boundaries between artistic disciplines that she discovered their extreme porousness. By steeping herself in the site's soul, she creates bespoke and poetic installations in the form of artistic performances far more than artwork. Through the evocative power of these elements, she seeks to create spaces that can translate feelings and provide sensations in emotionally charged areas.

ARTIST

Marion Flament

Béchir Boussandel

Béchir Boussandel was born in 1984 in Saint-Pol-Sur-Mer. He Lives and works in Lille, France. Boussandel is engaged in an original attempt: to paint not what one sight but what one perceives, meaning his desire to depict a mental and not a sensitive space. This is an invitation to contemplation, where color is central and in movement, as an environment without limits. He is interested in the boundaries that seem to exist between intimate and public spaces. Most often, the demonstration of this duality involves everyday objects whose function is related to territory, mobility, appropriation, or habitat. The profound reality is a mysterious and primordial realm, often rendered by Boussandel as a magical landscape full of ambiguous symbols and pictorial metaphors. The artist sees the creative process as a psychological journey resulting from a meditative and near-mystical practice in which curious things become a reality.

ARTIST

Béchir Boussandel

Jean Marie Haessle

Jean Marie Haessle was born in Buhl, Haut-Rhin, France. After leaving Alsace and spending three years in Paris, the turning point in his career was his decision to move to New York in 1967. As someone who wields several styles, he shows us how we can appreciate the evidence of a shifting sensibility, one in which the traditions of European modernist painting meld with the glorious anticipations and romantic spontaneities of the New York School. The riot of colors and visible strokes suggests a palimpsest, whose overlays of paint indicate the obsessive activity of the artist. Haessle burgeoned over a time of cultural and political tumult but also a high period in painting, in both the market ironies of Pop art and the legacy of the abstract expressionists. Over the years, the artist was celebrated with numerous shows across the globe including New York, Miami, Texas, California, France, and Italy. He belongs to a generation that was great at painting sublime feelings, and his gift has been the prodigious pursuit of his own style and doing justice to what he saw around him in Soho.

ARTIST

Jean Marie Haessle

Baptiste Tavernier

Baptiste Tavernier is a French artist based in Tokyo. His artistic journey began with a focus on music and composition but quickly evolved into digital and multimedia projects. He architects a complex creative multiverse encompassing dystopian structures, experimental music, photography, painting, and digital arts. Drawing from a solid history of international exhibitions and transdisciplinary collaborations, he further expands his polymath oeuvre with intense concern with pattern and logic, relentless exploration of craft discipline, and creativity without horizons. He now focuses on creating mixed media art that combines 3D printing technologies with traditional painting or photographic techniques. His current project centers around creating intricate, fantastic wall sculptures titled "Uchroniens" that reflect the fascination with the intersection of technology, humanity and time. These sculptures represent a culmination of Baptiste's various interests and experiences and a new chapter in his artistic journey.

ARTIST

Baptiste Tavernier

About French May

It is the second year Whitestone Gallery has participated in French May, featuring our exhibition as an associated project of the French May Arts Festival 2023. Established in 1993, French May is one of Asia's most significant cultural events. With more than 150 programmes presented across two months, it has become an iconic part of Hong Kong's cultural scene, reaching over 1 million visitors annually. For 30 years, French May has been both truly international and distinctly local and wishes to contribute to the unique appeal of Asia's World City.

Windows of the soul
2023.05.17- 06.29

HONG KONG / H Queen’s

7-8/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central,Hong Kong
Tel: +852 2523 8001
Fax: +852 2523 8005
Opening Hours: 11:00 - 19:00
Closed: Sunday, Monday
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