SIMON MARTIN | Le baiser dans la forêt | ICICLE CULTURAL SPACE SHANGHAI

Address : ESPACE CULTUREL ICICLE ICCF GARDEN 2, rue Hengshan – district de Xuhui, Shanghai

The galerie Jousse Entreprise is glad to announce A Kiss in the Forest, the first solo exhibition by Simon Martin in China at the ICICLE Cultural Space – Shanghai.

Bringing together a group of recent oil on canvas created between 2023 and 2025, the Shanghai exhibition explores the timeless motif of the embrace. Each painting preserves a trace of it — a moment, a breath, a glimmer.

The soft, matte palette is rooted in muted, powdery tones, where light does not reflect but diffuses, absorbed by the surface. This chromatic treatment imparts to the whole a subdued, spectral atmosphere, in which reality fragments within memory, allowing the remnants of sensation to resurface. His painting unfolds within a space of slowness and silence, favoring evocation over narration, ambiguity over assertion.

“At once near and far, his figures linger on the edge of absence. Diffuse, evanescent, they inhabit the threshold of the visible — between waking and dreaming, appearance and disappearance. In these subdued canvases, behind half-erased figures, there surfaces the premonition that all beauty is threatened with vanishing, that every sensation is destined to fade into the night. From this aesthetic of withdrawal arises a silent and secret sensuality, surrendered to the mist of remembrance, to the unspoken realm of desire.” — Myriam Kryger, exhibition curator

Curator : Myriam Kryger