PARIS.- Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris, is presenting Lavis en Rose, an exhibition by Tursic & Mille. This is the artists’ sixth exhibition with the gallery, and their first presentation in the Paris space.

With an artistic partnership spanning more than two decades, painters Tursic & Mille engage in a profound reflection on painting and the notion of representation. Through an empirical pictorial practice open to all conceptual and material possibilities, and to the accidents inherent to the medium, they approach painting both as object and subject. Giving as much importance to the concept, process and materiality of painting as to the use of imagery, the artists ceaselessly reinvent their practice, developing a distinctive way of thinking through painting today.

Lavis en Rose begins, through its title, with a homophony, a play on words, a misunderstanding: Lavis ‘wash’ / La vie ‘life’. Thus a cliché, a promise of happiness, is transformed into a simple technical process dominated by the colour rose (rose being an anagram of Eros). This misunderstanding is perhaps also the one they pursue within the very idea of figurative painting, with the eternal internal conflict between image and painting.

Here, pink acts as a disruptive element, like a dual-purpose filter. Physically, it adds a material layer to the painting (sometimes pushing it to the limits of monochrome). Semantically, it instils distance, a sensation of instability that acts like a veil which simultaneously disrupts while affirming the complex nature of perception and representation. Lavis en Rose is a journey, as gentle as it is incendiary, through a world in tension.

The exhibition begins with a programmatic painting. A portrait of a young woman looking at her fingers stained with pink paint. Half surprised, half disgusted, she seems to be wondering what she is going to make of it, what to do with it. ‘This painting could be a portrait of any painter at work, confronted with their demon, these pigments diluted in oil, uncontrollable, stuck to their fingers, body and soul, heady and rebellious against the brushstrokes that claim to have power over them,’ writes curator Judicaël Lavrador. ‘And yet, the paint does what it wants: it appears out of nowhere, spoiling the image as much as it traces it.’2

In the first room, two landscapes face each other. The first, a distant landscape with a pink starry sky, presents the infinitely large. Across from it, a closer sky with rockets flying across it, evokes the infinitely human. On the side walls are two small painted wooden panels, and two still lifes featuring cigarette butts.

At the centre of the exhibition, the inverted Hallali unfolds across three paintings. The work uses several iconographic sources, as well as different visions, painting styles and temporalities, as if the scene came from a memory tinged with confusion. In a woodland consumed by symbolic flames, animals flee in panic, faced with an unidentified threat that is no longer localised but permeates beyond the composition. In contrast to this movement, a female painter sits static in front of her easel, palette in hand, brush suspended. Next to her, a man in a suit, cigarette in hand, observes nonchalantly, as if witnessing an ordinary scene. Tursic & Mille question the anachronistic nature of the medium by contrasting frenzy and urgency with the long duration of painting.

Paysage Rose is a diptych in which a suburban house is engulfed by flames rising into a faded pink sky. This work is part of a series begun in 2005, in which fire, omnipresent, becomes a metaphysical figure: less an event than a latent state, it inhabits the landscape and alters the light. The pink lavis, covering the entire surface, softens and veils the image, making it almost unreal and more disturbing. The painting is here divided in two, thus splitting the internal temporality of the composition into two possible events. A young woman is portrayed staring out at the viewer with a vague gaze: she poses on a sofa in the middle of a burning clearing, strangely inhabiting the work. The forest around her is in flames, yet the scene remains surprisingly calm, everything carefully placed, as in a design catalogue. This fusion of domestic space and wild space, this uniformity created by the transparent pink wash, instils a sense of unease, an existential ambiguity.

Simultaneously, at 46 rue du Temple, a selection of paintings on paper from Papers 2018–2022 is on display, revealing the empirical aspect of Tursic & Mille’s practice. These accidental and unconscious compositions, accumulated over a timespan of more than twenty years, present works in progress and ultimately create unintentional abstract paintings – materialisations of the very practice of painting, a constant and raw wonder of colour. These pigments diluted in oil, uncontrollable. And yet, the paint does what it wants.

Ida Tursic (*1974, Belgrade, Serbia) and Wilfried Mille (*1974, Boulogne-Sur-Mer, France) live and work in Mazamet, France. Tursic & Mille’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at numerous institutions, most recently including FRAC – Fonds regional d’art contemporain de Normandie, Caen (2023); Consortium Museum, Dijon (2022); Le Portique, Le Havre (2021); Muzeum Sztuki, Łodz (2020); Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris (2017); Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dole (2011); FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand (2011) and Le Musée de Serignan (2008–2009). The artist duo were the recipients of the Fondation Simone et Cino Del Duca prize in 2020 and the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard Prize in 2009. They were nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2019.

Tursic & Mille’s works are in the permanent collections of the Berardo Collection, Lisbon; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; FNAC – Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, Paris; FRAC – Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand; FRAC – Bourgogne, Dijon; FRAC – Le Plateau, Paris; Le Consortium, Dijon; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dôle; and Musée Régional d’Art Contemporain de Sérignan, among others.

1 É. Troncy in the Press Release for Tursic & Mille: Tenderness, Consortium Museum, 2022.
2 J. Lavrador, ‘Tursic & Mille, la peinture à la sauce pigmentée’, in Libération, 2022.