Salvatore Puglia’s baroque compositions are an admixture of photographs, drawings, embroidery and illuminated manuscripts. Incorporating ceramics he stages a curious menagerie: aligning species domesticated with wild, both long extinct and familiar, be they indexed or imaginary. A plurality of fauna refer to the forest primeval, prehistoric caves, and mythology. The codex of creatures classified in the Middle Ages, Buffon’s anatomical diagrams, myriad legends, fairy tales, and other literary gems are a fantastic voyage back in time…

Royal Canin, in order to celebrate its 50th anniversary, pays tribute to the relationship of men and dogs, heroes of our daily life, with Compagnons, two photo exhibitions by Charlotte Dumas, a Dutch artist forever passionate in her observation of the link between man and animal.

FLAIR Galerie presents, from September 19 to November 24, 2018, a selection of photographs taken between 2009 and 2011, as well as some pictures taken from a work created this year for Royal Canin. These latter are exhibited from September 19 to October 3, 2018, on the railings of the Jardin d’Été, boulevard des Lices. Visitors will discover portraits of dogs and cats, companions of everyday in the service of humanity.

On this occasion, a book is published by Éditions Glénat.

FLAIR Galerie presents from June 30^th to September 12^th an exhibition of photographs by Laurence Leblanc, winner of the 2016 Prix Niépce, and spotted early on by collector Marin Karmitz. Chéa, her iconic image has been shown world wide.
Now coaxed into the game by FLAIR Galerie, she selects some twenty photographs related to the animal kingdom for an exhibition where we regain the permanence of her regard, which combines and unites, like breath.

FLAIR Galerie presents, from March 30th to June 23rd 2018, drawings and paintings by Caroline Desnoëttes who inscribes her artistic approach within an ecological form of thinking by focusing on endangered species. Through life-size pieces on Japanese or Indian paper, she raises awareness about the vulnerability of nature and the fragility of resources confronting the scourge of humanity: poaching, pollution and deforestation.

The works of Caroline Desnoëttes will also be on show in the streets of Arles from March 29th, with Eléphantômatiques and at Église des Frères-Prêcheurs from April 8th to April 29th, where a blue whale will swim in cascades of security blankets in the midst of chapels reserved for wild cats, monkeys and other graphic safaris.

Three events in three venues allow us to discover the work of an artist who has got her eye on man’s place in the face of nature.

I could not have imagined when, at the age of forty-nine, I found my childhood teddy bear in a flea market, the fervour that this reunion would kindle. How so many adults, here and elsewhere, have arduously guarded the bear in their life, how certain bears have inspired celebrities (Jean-Paul Gaultier, Jane Goodall…), I hadn’t the slightest inkling. I only discovered this by telling my own story about a hundred times. During this photo shoot, the bear became a kind of Petite Madeleine, childhood archives were unpacked, and I was now privy to family secrets.

FLAIR Galerie presents, from September 2nd through November 25th, 2017 artworks by painter Pierre Desfons: a world teeming with baroque and flamboyant visions, rendered via razor-sharp graphic strokes. The artist creates a delirious bestiary of animals out of his imagination, and any resemblance to actual species, living or dead is entirely intentional.

From July 1 to August 26, 2017, Flair Galerie presents Roger Ballen’s photographs, a special collection taken from 2000 to 2008. We glimpse “his visual statements” with mysterious accents, issuing from the series Shadow Chamber and Boarding House. To finesse Jean Cocteau’s quote, “Cinema is modern day writing, whose ink is light itself”, his ineffable photographs, a kind of atemporal writing, reinvent themselves under the eye and as per a mise en scène, behind the curtain, so to speak. They ground the turbulent history of our world, under the light of a hypothetical fire.
Deep dive into the intriguing universe of a most influential photographer from the debut of the 21st century, who is also presenting a new installation/Exposition, The House of the Ballenesque, as part of les Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles, this summer.

In the anouk’s drawings — I don’t resort to “the” to deify an actress as the French do, when she so wittingly effaces herself, overshadowed by the animals she draws; I omit her name’s majuscule, so that she may better be seen as one of them; I write the anouk as one would say the bear, the bird — we come back to our senses, as beasts spring from frames, that were never enclosures. For we cannot picture their borders, since we abandon the bounds separating humans and animals. The anouk sees, traces, draws, paints, starting with her own species; then on to all the living. In her gaze, or that of a goat or a dog, one reads the melancholy or the bewilderment, often a combination of the two. I couldn’t find another way to view this world and these times, if I tried.

From December 3, 2016 to January 7, 2017, FLAIR Galerie presents the work of the sculptor Roland Roure. Convinced that man is an animal, he manipulates raw materials and words with equal malice, the odd beast lurking where no one expects it. This ensemble forms an open alphabet developed during 40 years by Roland Roure.

From September 3^rd to November 26^th, 2016, FLAIR Galerie presents “Games”, watercolors and colored inks by painter and set designer Lucio Fanti. A leaping bull, dreaming dog, jagged-edged black horse, half-rooster and half-donkey chimera, the odd fly or bee as an incongruous presence here or there … this unique bestiary examines, surprises, amuses. Romanticism, poetry, history and drolleries are mingled, always with a proper dose of irony, a characteristic of Lucio Fanti’s work. These variations on a theme are indeed diverting and quite casually reveal many secrets about their maker. Come play.