INTO THE WOODS – DANS LES BOIS

Opening on Thursday 3 April 2025, from 6 p.m.

“The forest is a state of mind, it has its thoughts, its dreams, its whispers. It is a mysterious being with a soul like man, and it suffers like him.”

Les Contemplations by Victor Hugo, published in 1856

Under the title Into the Woods/ Dans les bois, Galerie Taménaga is pleased to present a group show bringing together 4 contemporary artists with diverse roots and sensibilities: the Japanese Yuichiro Sato, the French Pierre Roy-Camille, the Italian Enrico Tealdi and the Korean Youn Hye Sung. Through their paintings, each artist explores in their own way the timeless theme of the forest. This vegetal space, sometimes dense and abundant, sometimes bare and minimal, remains one of the last refuges where human influence is still limited; nature reigns as the uncontested mistress.

The forest thus embodies this privileged space where our collective imaginations have always been nourished – elusive and infinite, where the visible and the invisible coexist. It is a place where man often ventures, not to dominate, but to find himself, to reconnect with a primal essence, closer to his soul. In its heart, it becomes the setting for a suspended space-time, as if frozen in eternity. Far from being just a place of contemplation or aimless wandering, it transforms into a terrain of intense emotion, evoking deep, sometimes mystical, sometimes dreamlike resonances in us; a metaphor for the human inner soul, for that infinite which is both near and far, for what is hidden and what is revealed in our most secret corners.

More than the forest itself, the artists paint light. The light that slips through, illuminates, and transforms; from the deep shadows of the underbrush to the sunlit treetops, from the reflection of a droplet of water following the grooves of bark to the sun’s reflection on the veins of leaves. The forest becomes this field of invisible forces, where the interplay between light and darkness shapes our perception.

From his Finnish forest, Yuichiro Sato captures the anatomy of birches and other pines. Through his pencil drawing, he offers black-and-white works of unrelenting sharpness, a kind of X-ray of the living, where the minute detail and the vastness of the forest unite in a silent truth.

In contrast to this precision, Pierre Roy-Camille inscribes the landscape into a stratified memory. The forest becomes a jungle. Imprint forms the basis of his language, indelible marks that permeate the canvas, almost to better capture the very evanescence of life. Between delicacy and power, he shapes a dreamlike iconography, where each mark, each layer of pigments reveals ancient memories as if etched into the thickness of time.

For Enrico Tealdi, the forest dissolves into a misty atmosphere, like a floating veil where the image seems to slip away under the breath of time. On the border between nostalgia and dream, forms evaporate, as though extracted from a distant past. Reality wavers between appearance and disappearance. The vegetation, in its blurred contours, invades the space, filling every nook with an uncertain, almost unreal human presence.

Finally, Youn Hye Sung’s work presents a pictorial exploration where only light remains as the founding principle. Here, shadow is no longer a mere contrast: it becomes matter, generating shifting forms. Trees, leaves, and plants dissociate like a shattered prism where light, refracted, disperses into a myriad of nuances and vibrations.

This exhibition, far beyond a mere sylvan evocation, traces the outlines of a delicate dialogue between impregnation and precision, persistent memory and fleeting forgetfulness, the density of shadow and the light that illuminates it. The forest, nature – far more than a mere backdrop – is a space where the complex beauty of human existence reveals itself, in perpetual metamorphosis under the influence of invisible and silent forces. This nature, caught between shadow and light, invites us to reflect on the fragility and depth of our relationship with it, both a source of wonder and a mirror of our human condition.

YUICHIRO SATO • PIERRE ROY-CAMILLE • ENRICO TEALDI • YOUN HY SUN