Trois pour quatre petites formes brèves (Three for Four Short Forms)
The Pierced House: A Topography of Fragility. What strikes first is the silence of the form. It seeks neither to seduce nor to impose. It waits, resting on the ground, in a posture of withdrawal. And yet, everything within it is tension.
Nella Esquian – 2025
In Mes nuits souciantes (My Troubled Nights) – Alain Quesnel sought to compose an installation both intimate and unsettling, where each element seems suspended in silent tension. The work unfolds in semi-darkness, revealing a mental space where the viewer is invited to sit — quite literally — in front of love, memory, and unease. Through a rigorous staging and a controlled economy of signs, the artist offers an immersive piece that explores the tensions between memory, desire, and solitude.
Nella Esquian – 2025
Drawings. Drawings on paper, what could be more common and simpler? Of course, we must also talk about color. But little or no color… a drawing limited to black pencils, a black pigment diluted in poppy seed oil as a simple binder, a little white paint, and sometimes a bit of golden yellow, like a reminder of past icons.
Alain Quesnel – 2023
Comment je me suis évadé des Plombs (How I Escaped the Plombs) eludes grasp. Yet, the attraction is undeniable: the sensuality of the materials and objects placed here, their imposing physical presence, captivates. But to feel their imprint, there is no need to touch.
Marie-Luce Thomas – 2015
Attempting first to take hold of the exhibition space…to go against these overly familiar, well-worn places, to grasp the limits, the walls, the height of the ceiling, the openings, the passages, the floor ; to favor the sparse, to embrace emptiness for once, and finally to twist space as if it were pivoting around the objects.
Anne Champigny – 2010
Creating art : the poetic measure of gesture…(…) And yet, the angel has folded its wings into the jar, the jar has sunk into the clay, the clay has embedded itself into the table, the table encloses within its legs the remnants of a formwork. Without a stir of dust: no fleeting rise, no soft settling, not even a deposit—the passage of time has paused.
Marie-Luce Thomas – 2002
The Melancholy of Icarus. The wing remains still. No beat, no sound, no imperceptible breath signals the presence of the foretold angels. Indeed, the angel has left the stage, leaving only its wings behind—as a sign.
Marie-Luce Thomas – 1998
On the paths of conveyance, tireless travelers…Singular arrangements, expansive assemblages. Islands of light. That is the first thing one sees—the deployment of unusual archipelagos in the darkness of a space. A network of connections, junctions, and interactions between disparate elements.
Marie-Luce Thomas – 1994
Sleds of light. Chiaroscuro, ambivalence, energy…words that serve as keys to enter Alain Quesnel’s work. A practice that interrogates, surprises, but cannot leave one indifferent, for it speaks to us even before we grasp it at first glance—of energy, of duality, of balance. What matters most is to take the time. The approach to the work will unfold in silence, for within confrontation lies the exchange and the mystery.
Françoise Plessis – Chantier d’Artistes – CRDC Espace Graslin – Nantes – 1994
An exhibition pavilion. Three rooms. The shutters are closed, and the lighting is absent. In each room, Alain Quesnel has arranged seemingly disparate elements that align, connect, and form three luminous variations of a stellar cartography. Singular electrical tinkering.
Marie-Luce Thomas – 1993