NIMES.- Carré d’Art – Museum of Contemporary Art is dedicating a major exhibition to Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, whose collaborative practice, developed over more than twenty years, directly questions the conditions of existence of painting in a world saturated with images. Their work neither seeks to preserve the medium nor to assert its purity, but rather to expose it to excess, collision, and dissonance.
Drawing on the full range of iconographic registers—landscape, portrait, still life, abstraction, advertising imagery, and scholarly references—the artists compose paintings traversed by multiple strata, interruptions, accidents, and parasitic gestures. Images are sampled, displaced, superimposed, and sometimes altered to the point of near disappearance, producing constant tensions between figuration and abstraction, recognition and loss of reference points.
This logic of dissonance—always variable —runs throughout the exhibition, immersing viewers in the intimacy of the artists’ studio and in an empirical practice in which painting functions as a system whose rules are constantly shifting. Styles contaminate one another, emotions shift, and motifs circulate from one work to another. Sentimental scenes borrowed from postwar imagery, landscapes marked by latent catastrophes, floral motifs, abstract gestures, or pictorial fragments coexist in a deliberately unstable proximity. Painting, omnipresent, acts as a critical tool, questioning —often with humor—a certain established order, the hierarchy of taste, and the seductive power of images.
Rejecting any definitive definition of the medium and constantly testing its limits, Tursic & Mille extend painting into space through cut panels, burned wood, works on paper, offset plates used as palettes, or autonomous fragments of color. Painting thus spills beyond the canvas, leaving the frame to become an environment, blurring the boundaries between image and object, surface and matter.Rooted in the history of painting while constantly putting it to the test, their work offers a visual experience in which nothing ever settles definitively. Variable Geometry Dissonances invites viewers to move through an unstable pictorial field composed of frictions, contradictions, repetitions, and displacements, where painting does not represent the world but rather interrogates its forms, affects, and contemporary tensions.
Ida Tursic, born in 1974 in Belgrade (Serbia). Wilfried Mille, born in 1974 in Boulogne sur-Mer (France). They live and work in Mazamet (France). Winners of the 11th Ricard Corporate Foundation Prize in 2009, nominees for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2019, and recipients of the Simone and Cino Del Duca Foundation Prize in 2020, they have been the subject of numerous exhibitions in galleries, art centers, FRAC collections, and museums in France and abroad. They are represented by the galleries Max Hetzler (Berlin, Paris, London, Marfa), Alfonso Artiaco (Naples), and Pietro Spartà (Chagny). They have also completed several public commissions, such as the Music Salon of Villa Laurens in Agde in 2015 and the ceiling of the municipal council chamber at the Capitole in Toulouse in 2025.
