Alexandre Clanis

Alexandre Clanis was born in 1990 in Bordeaux, where his studio stands in the middle of the city. He studied architecture at La Cambre in Brussels and in Bordeaux. From 2017 onwards he has shown work in Belgium, France, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia.

His painting begins by opening a space: unrolling a length of paper, unfolding a tarpaulin, to make a surface. Once it is on the floor, that surface becomes a territory he enters, "an expanse to be walked". The movement across it is carried by rhythm, touch and repetition, as in a walk. The duration of the work is the time his hand needs to take the measure of that territory.

The paint is loose and fluid: it registers the imprint, the impetus, the intention. Once the movement is finished, the artist leaves and the canvas is on its own. "Like a note that goes on resonating, it lives by itself." The paint passes gradually from liquid to solid; what was a wave becomes "a memory with thickness", a trace of the passage, reactivated when a viewer stands in front of it.

His supports belong to the studio rather than to the picture: kraft paper, paper, industrial canvas, canvas, wood, tracing paper, and even abrasive paper covered in plaster. Formats run from a 55 × 45 cm sheet to surfaces of 300 × 200 cm, sometimes in diptychs or triptychs. Two bodies of work recur: the Mouvement series and the Empreinte series.

In a text written in 2020, the art critic Élise Girardot describes a painting that seizes and envelops the viewer, and that sets in motion a confrontation of scattered bodies made of traces and movements. She reads it as a reflection on the impalpable and the unsayable, conducted in the elusive space between the observer's body and the mass of paint, and quotes the artist: "I paint to explore silences, to question a space that comes before language." In the studio, the paintings made on the floor are then stood upright: from the horizontal to the vertical, body and gaze are brought face to face with the canvas. The artist describes wanting to "stand in a kind of nakedness before the world".

Zone Trois Galerie gave him the solo exhibition Grande Ourse, from 13 February to 29 March 2025, with Château Desmirail as patron. He is also one of the ten artists in Summer Exhibition II, from 28 May to 12 September 2026, where he shows Empreinte ocre.

Painting, or looking at the night sky, throws us towards the unknown. Like the Great Bear, painting invites us into movement — of the body, by way of the gaze.

My working process begins by opening a space. Unrolling a length of paper, or unfolding a tarpaulin, to make a surface. Once it is on the floor, that surface becomes a territory I enter: an expanse to be walked. As in a walk, the movement is carried by rhythm, touch and repetition. The time of the work is the time my hand needs to take the measure of that territory.

The paint, loose and fluid, registers the imprint, the impetus and the intention. Once I reach the end of the movement, I leave, and the canvas is on its own. Like a note that goes on resonating, it lives by itself. Gradually the material passes from liquid to solid. What was a wave becomes a memory with thickness, a trace of the passage. That memory is reactivated when the canvas faces a viewer. It vibrates in the space and invites the onlooker into an experience of painting.