In this group exhibition marking the start of the season, you will discover « tour à tour » artists from the Maubert Gallery, for whom the circle or sphere remains a testing field for both plastic, sensitive, and conceptual experimentation. 

      Nature is round: it could abolish all discontinuity, and its movement seems eternal. The circle thus reflects our relationship with the world and its landscapes. In his series Openings and Décentrations, Arnaud Lesage reveals how circular patterns, collected by the artist through slow nomadism around the globe, (de)structure vision to become potential signs: a rounded opening in a horizon line evoking a bull's-eye window onto a nebulous panorama, a concrete tunnel divided by light wells, with curves resembling circle waves on anthracite water...

      Humans and nature together create new landscapes where the circle, which has neither top nor bottom, beginning nor end, can perfectly embody the notions of communion and circularity. In Les belles manières by Sara Favriau, a multitude of tiny sculpted discs interlace, accumulate, and blend, symbolizing the connections between humans, nature and art. The work, developed during a residency in partnership with the Compagnie Française du Bouton, questions the gesture of the sculptor and the artisan, as well as the transformation of material—in this case, buttons made of wood, mother-of-pearl, or plaster—whose initial function is abolished in favor of a return to an organic, expandable, almost animated form: where art becomes alive again.

      Atsunobu Kohira also explores the processes of life's emergence by materializing invisible energies, particularly the carbon cycle. Here, he presents a Graphite Sculpture, where fine graphite structures envelop plants curled up in a circle. A journey into the infinitely small matter, where every end marks the beginning of a new phase.

      The circle thus refers to life and its cycle, as seen in Erik Nussbicker's work, where he questions our place in nature, testing the limits of our physical form. The circle reappears sometimes in post-meditative paintings, within installations evoking Earth and the cosmos, or in Peaux de terre, pieces of spheres cut from silk carrying the traces of flies raised within them. Suspended on the gallery wall, this nacreous membrane, thin as skin, serves as a symbolic tool to better understand the world, our origins, and our purpose.

      This skin that envelops the body can become a refuge, a notion that has permeated Nathalie Talec's work since the 1980s: the globe and its poles, the igloo, spherical hoods, are all spaces of retreat for the body and mind. In the video Les silences parlent entre eux (2003), this recurrence of the circle multiplies to create hypnotic and hallucinatory effects. Dressed in a lab coat, a deer mask, and a hula hoop, the artist evokes a scientific expedition to polar lands as well as a strange shamanic or psychedelic ritual. The ring becomes a symbol of achievement, much like the interlaced rings of the Olympics. The figure of heroism also reappears in a Swarovski-studded red lifebuoy or in target drawings (I predict the riot, 2007).

      Micha Laury also studies our physical limits in relation to our perception of the world. The circularity of space (the globe, for example) is linked to the circularity of time (the clock face, for example): in his 1975 performance drawing, a man, located on the North Pole axis, gradually turns on himself for 24 hours, in the opposite direction of Earth's rotation, thus against its natural movement. This act of resistance against the way the world "turns" reminds us that art leads to transcendence: Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913)—the first kinetic artwork, foreshadowing the Rotoreliefs (1935)—already liberated itself from its function in favor of its form, a circle, and its essential quality, movement.

 Art is therefore a "revolution." The metaphor of the moving star is frequently revisited by artists, here with Adrien Couvrat's solar paintings or Nicolas Muller's lunar rules. In the latter’s work, the duality between random and controlled strokes is a constant inherent to his work around the emancipation of forms and constraints: the spontaneous, expressive, rebellious gesture within a reasoned, standardized, authoritative framework resonates with a political thought concerned with the management of the landscape and social space.

      The orbit, the globe... characterize both the lexicon of celestial bodies and the ocular apparatus. Art would therefore be a gaze, in motion, an exploration of the world in all directions. For some photographers, like Arnaud Lesage, the circle as a subject becomes an extension of the camera and, more broadly, of the photographer's eye. A series of Polaroids by Payram presents tightly framed shots of the faces of pregnant Iranian refugee women: the circular reflection of the camera's diaphragm is found lodged in the subject's iris, responding to the life developing within them. A sort of mise en abyme of the gaze, highlighting the fascination with the eye motif in some artists. Agnès Geoffray goes as far as to present an anonymous photograph under glass of a bulging eye. Everything is round: the globe, the iris, the pupil... Even fixed, restrained by the glass, the gaze moves in three directions, it is omnipresent. It watches. In his monumental paintings on paper, José Loureiro twirls his brushes like a potter shaping forms: eyes, surveillance cameras, car headlights... these large hypnotic circles function as signals that both point, scan, and spread like the rings of wood.

      Sylvie Fanchon, on the other hand, has a taste for the "almost" abstract. She never fully adheres to any movement, and her circles are more "abstractions of the real." What do we actually see? An abstraction with three assembled circles or a Mickey Mouse? Simple accumulated circles or faces, eyes, flowers?

       The circle, in a way, connects expression to emotion. While some see the body as a circle (notably in Laurent Goldring's video stills), others, conversely, view the circle anthropomorphically: we see eyes, faces, brains... In any case, the circle remains close to a portrait, a memory, an interiority as in Nathalie Elemento's work. She, who favors the line, the fold, the dotted line as a sign of continuity and connection, offers us with Contemplate, circular folded boxes reminiscent of the plates once found in the wall decorations of bourgeois homes. Here, no popular or historical scenes are drawn in the center: the backgrounds are neutral, white ("in relief") or black ("flat"), and evoke postures that could be our own. By giving them first names as titles (here Norah and Myriem), Nathalie Elemento humanizes them. And even if the drawings in the center have disappeared in favor of a neutral monochrome, the more or less pronounced folds transform the anonymous plate-sculpture into a portrait-medallion.