À PEINE UN LIEU
The Bacqueville Gallery is pleased to present a new solo exhibition by Gautier Deblonde.
Gautier Deblonde continues his exploration of the intimacy of creation with a new series dedicated to artists' studios, a subject he approaches with poetry, through silences and suspended moments. Since 2004, artists from around the world have entrusted him with capturing their studios in their absence. Each photograph captures what escapes the hurried glance: here, a magazine page with a portrait of Simone de Beauvoir in Rose Wylie's studio; there, the successive layers of an overflowing painting at Callum Innes's studio; or these accumulations of objects, both sacred and profane, at Michel Nedjar's studio. Gautier Deblonde does not merely document, he reveals, inscribing in the photographic material the essence of the places, their textures, their breath, their secret power.
For this exhibition, the artist reveals other facets of his work by incorporating Entre scènes, a five-part split-screen video alternating between images filmed in fourteen artists' studios; a portrait of the painter Jules de Balincourt; a contact sheet; and a series of still lifes. These sensitive fragments tell the story of the artists through their surroundings.
Exhibition from September 25 to November 8, 2025.
Opening on Thursday September 25, from 6.30pm to 9pm.
Image above: Sans titre, Londres (detail), 2025
Image below: Atelier Michel Nedjar, Paris, 2020
There are places that do not show themselves, that do not assert themselves. Blurred spaces, more traversed than inhabited, where the artistic gesture begins, is interrupted, or simply passes through. It is in these margins that I propose to situate this exhibition.
"À peine un lieu" brings together works that do not illustrate the artist but rather suggest them through what surrounds them: displaced objects, fragments of matter, remnants of the studio, the silences of spaces. Here, intimacy is never frontal; it is revealed through subtle presences, secondary signs, residual elements.
This is not a mapping of studios, nor a visual biography. It is a sensitive journey where each piece is a trace of existence, an echo of a thought in motion, an imprint left in negative.
The artists gathered here deliver, whether intentionally or not, zones of intimacy—without effect, without staging.
I show what escapes direct gaze: interrupted gestures, objects without status, intermediate spaces.
The exhibition is composed of fragments, empty spaces, and materials in waiting. Works that do not pretend to say everything but leave enough silence for the gaze to dwell within them. Absence then becomes language.
"À peine un lieu" is also an invitation to slow down, to recognize in the formless and the unfinished a mode of expression as powerful as the artwork itself.
Here I adopt a lateral gaze, where what seemed secondary becomes central, and where silence itself takes form.
Gautier Deblonde, July 2025
