PARIS.- For this exhibition, I wanted to immerse myself entirely in abstraction—setting aside any notion of subject or image as a starting point for the painting. The aim was to lose myself in the painting itself: its surface, its color, the way tones play against one another.
Everything here begins with instinct—a gesture, a first chaotic sketch. What I’m after is a certain vibration, a specific texture, something matte and chalky. Through layer upon layer, I want the painting to arrive at a kind of harmony, a balance, a feeling. I’m chasing the accident, the unplanned moment.
This is slow work—studio time. Paintings can sit unresolved for weeks, caught between one state and the next. Some of the canvases are older pieces, years old, that I’ve gone back and painted over. They build up like geological strata. Where traces of earlier layers show through—the pentimenti—the painting lays bare its own history, its false starts and changes of direction.
What emerges are archipelagos of form: works that read like miniature landscapes, fragments of cities, unfinished maps, or pieces of a wall. And somewhere along the way, an image appears unbidden—the trace of a place, a memory. That’s what ends up naming the painting.
—Pierre Bellot, 2026
Born in 1990, Pierre Bellot lives and works in Paris.
“Pierre Bellot uses various photographic sources or personal archives to create fictions where the composition obeys its own rules and creates a new meaning. By ridding each element of its original functionality, a formal game is established where the important thing becomes the path that crosses the work and associates each part to the whole. The image thus appears as the receptacle of inner visions. The subject is a bait, the starting point of an artificial structure in which the artist comes to trap the reality of the starting pattern.” -- Cécile Debray, Directrice du musée de l’Orangerie Viva Villa, Édition 2020, « Les vies minuscules »
Graduated from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris with honors. His work has been exhibited in Avignon (Collection Lambert), Paris (Bastille Design Center, Palais des Beaux-Arts, La Villette, Progress Gallery…), New York (56 Henry) and Berlin (Galerie Noah Klink). In 2019-2020, he was a member of the French Academy in Madrid, at Casa de Velázquez.
