Artists

Aurelie Nemours, Ode Bertrand, Simon Schubert, Sophie Zénon, Guénaëlle De Carbonnières, Chun Kwang Young, Louise Dumas, Hanane El Farissi, Jungwoo Hong, Birte Horn, Gustavo Riego Maidana, Jean-Philippe Roubaud, Carole Solvay, Renie Spoelstra

Press release

Peaux Fragiles brings together fourteen artists from seven countries whose practices, as diverse as paper itself, converge toward a single intuition: the fragility of a material can carry the strength of a gesture. This exhibition is part of the Volxem, Art in Forest event. 14 venues dedicated to contemporary art, offering a rich programme of exhibitions, performances and guided walks. Paper is a skin of the world. It creases, tears, burns, carries the imprint of the gesture and the memory of time. In our societies saturated with digital images and synthetic materials, it embodies a quiet resistance: that of a material which ages, transforms, disappears. Peaux Fragiles is a collective exhibition dedicated to artistic practices that place paper, in all its plurality, at the heart of a questioning on the ephemeral, the trace and vulnerability. Ode Bertrand (b. 1930, France), Guénaëlle de Carbonnières (b. 1986, France), Chun Kwang Young (b. 1944, South Korea), Louise Dumas (b. 1983, France), Hanane El Farissi (b. 1990, Morocco), Jungwoo Hong (b. 1981, South Korea), Birte Horn (b. 1972, Germany), Aurélie Nemours (1910 - 2005, France), Gustavo Riego Maidana (b. 1983, Belgium), Jean-Philippe Roubaud (b. 1973, France), Simon Schubert (b. 1976, Germany), Carole Solvay (b. 1954, Belgique), Renie Spoelstra (b. 1974, Netherlands), Sophie Zénon (b. 1971, France). Through collage, drawing, cutting and installation, the works gathered here explore our relationship to what does not last: organic bodies, precarious architectures, archives destined for oblivion. The exhibition does not celebrate fragility as a weakness. It explores it as a condition, a philosophy of the artistic gesture. What is fragile is also what touches us, what speaks of the intimate, the mortal, the living. Jean-Philippe Roubaud (b. 1973, France) stretches drawing to the point of making it an architecture. His graphite paper strips confuse the eye between plane and volume, drawing and installation. His performance Five Minutes Beating, 150 BPM pushes the logic further still: the body becomes tool, percussion becomes trace, and drawing turns into event. Ode Bertrand (b. 1930, France) laureate of the Prix Aurélie Nemours 2025, presents white-on-white paper folds — a geometric skin brought into existence by relief alone. No colour, no pigment: only light reveals this fragile architecture of silence and rhythm. Aurélie Nemours (1910–2005, France) founding figure of French geometric abstraction, is represented by one of her Recherches Romantiques, a working paper where the line gropes forward, where the form is not yet decided. A sketch toward a future painting, never meant to be shown: the most fragile skin of all, that of doubt. Birte Horn (b. 1972, Germany) harvests the skin of things. Her Papercuts are carved from packaging boxes — cardboard she unfolds, cuts and strips of all writing to retain only colour. What once wrapped, what was destined to disappear, becomes painting. Other artists work paper as embodied memory. Chun Kwang Young (b. 1944, South Korea) wraps hundreds of triangles in Hanji (a Korean paper made from mulberry bark) taken from ancient Japanese, Korean and Chinese books. These plant skins, charged with centuries-old inscriptions, assemble into aggregations of harmonious chaos, where the infinitely small meets collective history. Simon Schubert (b. 1976, Germany) folds a white sheet tirelessly until, through light and relief alone, haunted architectural interiors emerge, emptied of all human presence: absence as subject, paper as the skin of a vanished world. Memory also runs through the work of Sophie Zénon (b. 1971, France), who layers photographs of hand-embroidered Begonias and 17th-century nautical charts onto Japanese paper. An echo of colonial botanical expeditions, where classifying the living was another way of conquering territories. Paper, the fragile body of this troubled memory. Jungwoo Hong (b. 1981, South Korea) accumulates layers of colors, forms and words in palimpsests, weaving together scribbling and narrative memory in drawings where past and present coexist in gentle tension. Hanane El Farissi (b. 1990, Morocco) works paper as a wounded skin. In her ink and water drawings architectural landscapes, crumbling facades, blue windows, destruction is visible but never final: small golden areas, in the manner of Japanese kintsugi, repair the fracture by making it visible. With Skins & Scars (2025), this logic becomes literal: fragments of leather laid on cotton paper, skin upon skin, scar upon surface. The wound becomes material, the support becomes body. Gustavo Riego Maidana (b. 1983, Belgium) inserts drawings of natural disasters into pages of stock market listings, financial paper as the backdrop for what markets cannot measure. With One Empty Dollar, a hollowed-out bill of which only the structure remains and a dollar locked in a cage, currency becomes specimen: capitalism revealed for what it is, a silent disaster that does not destroy all at once, but slowly empties from within. Two artists make paper the surface of a gaze turned toward the outside world. Louise Dumas (b. 1983, France) draws large shopfronts, windows and urban facades in dry pastel: plays of transparency and reflection blur interior and exterior, past and present. Each drawing is, she says, both threshold and border. Renie Spoelstra (b. 1974, Netherlands), laureate of the Prix Guerlain 2026, travels to the most remote sites: Peruvian glaciers, forests, lakes before transposing them in the studio into large charcoal formats. Her dense blacks and gradations of grey suspend the landscape between appearance and disappearance. The charcoal strokes and their erasures speak, she says, of life and loss. Guénaëlle de Carbonnières (b. 1986, France) literally excavates the image. Armed with a drypoint needle, she engraves silver gelatin photographs of destroyed buildings in Syria, drawing out from beneath the ruins of war the vestiges of ancient civilisations. Her incisions reveal what time buries. The photograph becomes a skin that is wounded, a fragile surface held in tension between what is visible and what remains latent. Finally, Carole Solvay (b. 1954, Belgium) abandons paper-as-support to make it one material among others: she assembles fragments of feathers with thread and paper in a daily meditation on lightness. These three-dimensional drawings, where gesture comes first and the hand seeks a balance between protection and exposure, speak of where skin draws the boundary between inside and outside. Together, these fourteen practices form a sensitive geography of what does not last. Not the celebration of a condemned material, but the recognition of what it makes possible.