NATHANAËLLE HERBELIN | À la surface, le fond de l’œil

The French Institute of Israel is hosting an exhibition by French artist Nathanaëlle Herbelin, curated by Tom Laurent, in its reception area. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition in Israel after a first exhibition at the Uhm-El-Fahem gallery in May 2021. Herbelin draws her inspiration from her immediate environment, observing and capturing subtle moments of everyday life that should have gone unnoticed.

Nathanaëlle Herbelin paints objects and beings, and less often, landscapes. These objects, these beings and these landscapes have in common to be seized by the same vision. This vision, whether it is hers or that which her painting offers us to project, covers these objects, these beings and these landscapes with a veil of familiarity – conferring on them the presence of what we have already been able to touch with our eyes. This is all the more true as she paints what happens between things, between beings, and sometimes between the two, under the eyes of some and others, and under ours. Starting from the vision of a suspended exchange that the looks and bodies of Michel, Emmanuel, Berhe and Zina, her Eritrean neighbors when she lived in the Central Station neighborhood of Tel Aviv, address in a painting she did in Israel, it will be a question of imagining what happens between her paintings. To seize it for what is woven in it, a screen where to recompose and project possible desires and fears – theirs, the artist’s, ours. The exhibition brings together a dozen paintings, mostly small formats, made in Israel and France -Tom Laurent, April 2022.

About the curator of the exhibition Tom Laurent
Tom Laurent has been editor-in-chief of the magazine Art Absolument since 2017, for which he has also edited several monographs and exhibition catalogs including Pluriel – Regards sur l’art contemporain israélien (Villa Emerige, Paris, 2012) or Christian Lapie. Les Metamorphes. Since 2017, he has been coordinating the Matsutani Prize, for which he has organized an exhibition of the 2016-2020 winners in Paris in 2021.

Photos: Yosef  Eyal – Institut Français d’Israël

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Vernissage : 16/06/2022 7:30 pm

Curator : Tom Laurent