A Midsummer Night’s Dream

2021/07/11 - 2021/09/11
DUMONTEIL Shanghai
Galerie Dumonteil is delighted to present “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, a small salon project featuring oil paintings by Bruno Gadenne (b.1990) and watercolors by Tamaris Borrelly (b.1987).

Borrowing the title from Shakespeare’s all-time celebrated comedy — in which he took early modern ideas about dreams as a channel to our emotions, desires, and inexplicable passions — both artists use their pictorial creations to explore human’s perception and projection of their surroundings through dreams, memories, digital devices, and other experiences.

Landscapes is of great importance in the work of Tamaris Borrelly and Bruno Gadenne, both passionate travellers, but at the same time it plays a very different role in their works.

To Bruno Gadenne, the landscape is a playground that allows him to manipulate the photos and sketches from his travel encounters, building an uncanny sense of wonder through the interplay of light and color —with this unique visual experience, one is torn between the real and the unreal, between dream and reality. Through “Symbiosis” and “Baron”, the viewers are immersed in these inexplicable appeals while being alerted to the unease that lurks within the seeming tranquility.

In Tamaris Borrelly’s works, however, the landscape is not only the substructure that she weaves the grand connection among humans, animals, and the environment, but also a space that encompasses the interpretation of reality — visions, legends, fantasies, etc. In “the Oldest Blood”, Borrelly alludes to symbols and images that foreground the diversity and commonality of early civilizations. And in “Circé”, the artist has pictured human biodegradation and our reunion with nature and spirits in diverse elemental forms.

Color is a crucial instrument for realizing both artist’s landscape-centered creations. Borrelly gives full play to the dreamlike quality of watercolor through her choice of color and approach to layering— the contrast and integration of colors and carefully formed white spaces, creating an other-worldliness composed of intricate organic forms and the diverse metamorphoses of the living world. From a completely different angle, Gadenne’s use of color emphasis the rendering of light and the deepness of transparent layers, resulting in an enchanted tension between light and dark.

Both Bruno Gadenne and Tamaris Borrelly put the viewer at the heart of their creation, transforming the viewing room into a fantasy land as “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” becomes a series of enchanting stories that viewers can only unfold with their imaginations.  
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