“Each man in his night goes towards his light. »- Victor Hugo Part of a long lineage of nocturnal landscape painters, Jérôme Bauduin makes the night the main subject of his recent paintings and the active element of his painting. The challenge of this series of paintings is therefore both to show the fascinating beauty of the urban night and to highlight its physical properties; its ability to transfigure colors and sublimate light. Fascinated by the particular energy of the nightlife of large cities, he translates through painting the tremendous potential offered by the night. As opposed to the constrained rhythms of the days, the night time of the big cities is for the individual one of the last ramparts of his freedom of action and expression. The night opens up the field of possibilities: it offers men and women a vacant time that often seems to stretch out, a free space to be surveyed according to new circulations - according to the desires, the impulse, the fantasy - allowing thus the most improbable encounters, the most unexpected experiences or the discovery of places hitherto unexplored. Manifestos for a night owl life, guided by chance and passions, these paintings are also for Jérôme Bauduin a way of questioning painting and playing with this paradoxical and fascinating reality: the night is ultimately more colorful than the day. The artist indeed reveals in this series, by means of a multitude of colored touches, the singular properties of the night, which has at the same time the power to concentrate the light, to exalt the primary colors, to make vibrate each shade protruding from the darkness but also to homogenize and create rhythmic continuities in the space of the canvas. His subject also allows him to translate the idea of movement through the vibrations of light: the gleams of the headlights form astral trails behind cars, the street lamps create mysterious halos in the sky, the windows become iridescent parallelepipeds. . Relying on photographs that he reworks with image editing software until obtaining a rendering which will serve as the basis for his composition, Jérôme Bauduin operates a bridge between the pictorial tradition and the tools of modernity. He uses contemporary techniques at the preparatory stage and returns to traditional oil painting techniques and old masters' varnishes at the time of the execution of the canvas. This synthesis is for him a way of fitting fully into his time and of paying homage to the artists who preceded him, who, like him, were the bearers of a questioning on the forces which animate the world, do so. evolve and induce our way of inhabiting it. BRUCE Bruce lives and works between Paris and Berlin. Born in 1977, in the Paris region, he belongs to the second generation of graffiti artists. He took his first steps in tagging in 1993, painted his first trains in 1995: whole cars, end to end, panels and other figures of style swept through the Paris metro and in Europe. He is known for the originality of his style, simple and endowed with a great force of impact and for his numerous collaborations with the artist Mina for their unique colorful and humorous graffiti which generally relate to various cultural subjects. Their pieces are marked by precise lines and effective simplicity and they brilliantly manage to combine figurative and abstract elements. José Luis CEÑA José Luis Ceña Ruiz was born in Malaga in 1982. He studied fine arts at the Complutense University of Madrid (2000-2005), engraving and graphic design at the Royal Spanish Mint in Madrid. Currently parallel to his career, professor of engraving in Master / Media Graphics Printing at the University of Castilla la Mancha. His paintings are rich in character. The tangibility of the composition allows the viewer to project their own feeling and meaning onto the work, creating their own individual interpretations. Some of his iconography emerges from his thoughts based on readings or personal experiences. There is an undeniable echo of the romantic mystery throughout the work. His work does not directly evoke the meaning, but rather suggests the reality hidden in the emotion, a chance, a story. His art functions as a matrix of melancholy feeling among the audience who, although they have not experienced the events described, will be poetically invited to feel nostalgia for the moments that belong to their past. Stéphane JOANNES Born in 1975 in Besançon, Stéphane Joannes studied at the Higher School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg (DNSEP Art). It is since 1997 that Stéphane Joannes has devoted himself mainly to the realization of ships on large canvases or in diptych. It was after a stay in Le Havre that Joannes became fascinated by these gigantic freighters traveling the seas of the world. In the 21st century painting and representing ships has become something unusual. We are familiar with 17th and 18th century boats, but Joannes succeeds in captivating us with his spectacular paintings which nevertheless give off an impression of tranquility and calm. A work of finish and irreproachable precision while Stéphane Joannes admits to you bluntly that when you have no genius, you have to work and still work. He works when others calculate, enchants us when others overwhelm us with boredom. He is a painter, a real one, a craftsman of silence and light. “Rusty freighters are tied up, forever. Air and water have the same dirty, slightly oily and transparent fluidity. The freighters are slowly dying. Their invisible passages, innumerable and noisy, still appear in regular lines over water and air, air and water. The metal will soon be gone, but not yet. A last trip is impossible, (…) Death has made a beauty. A silent, permanent flight watches with infinite patience the emptied carcasses of these supertankers and Joannes' taste for the material appears in all its exigency. »Alejandro QUINCOCES Born in 1951 in Bilbao where he still lives and works Alejandro Quincoces has been passionate from a young age as much by music as by painting. He began his studies of Fine Arts at the age of 36, and quickly obtained real recognition in Spain with numerous prizes, and by his presence in numerous collections. He is also exhibited regularly in Europe and the United States. The subjects to which he devotes himself are essentially urban landscapes: cities, factories, highways seen from far or near, which he fixes, thus withdrawing a moment of everyday reality from the incessant flow of time. Through the superposition of layers of oil paint on the wood, he seeks to capture the vibrant light of his surroundings. It is a mature, strong work, where the effects of matter and light create subtle vibrations. The artist plays on the tension between abstraction and referential painting. ROUX-FONTAINE Born in 1966 in Savoie, Eric ROUX-FONTAINE lives and works in Auvergne Rhône-Alpes. After the Beaux Arts de Saint Etienne in 1988, he exhibited at the Métropolis gallery (1991). The Museum of Fine Arts of Chambéry, in Savoy, offered him the opportunity to invest in the permanent collections of the museum in 1995, and to install his paintings in the middle of the collections of Italian primitives. He then began a long journey to meet Gypsy and Gypsy cultures around the world, in Poland, Romania, Bosnia, France, to northern India, the historical starting point of the Roma populations. From these trips, several collaborations were born, with Roma writers like Rajko Djuric, co-writer of Emir Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies and musicians like Thierry Robin. From 1998, he regularly exhibits his work in France and abroad. Between 1999 and 2003, at the Olivier Houg gallery, he presented “A palo seco” drawing and video installation, then “Sind”, photographs reworked in gold. In 2001, in Dublin “Wispering in paradise” at the Bridge Gallery. In 2002, at the Rez d'Art Contemporain in Meyzieux, he installed his “Nomad Garden”, a video and typographic work (The installation works like a fable and offers the visitor a “journey through Travel”). In 2007 he exhibited at the Phénix gallery in Brussels and has been collaborating since 2008 with the Felli gallery in Paris. He was presented in 2000 at the Turin Biennale and then in various Art fair (Rotterdam, Dublin…). His paintings have been acquired for the permanent collections of the Paul Dini Museum, and of the AIB Foundation (Ireland). In 2008, the Josep Niebla Foundation (Gironne, Spain) devoted a retrospective to him. Eric Roux- Fontaine has also produced several artist's books (Un voyage aux sources gitanes, Ed. Du Garde Temps, Rromano than, actual chroniques d'un pays imaginaire, Ed. Transbordeurs Elvis has left America Ed. Transbordeurs) and several catalogs of exhibitions have been edited during personal exhibitions. In 2010, a first monograph was devoted to him, published by Criteria. Since 2010 he has exhibited in the United States, notably in New York and Miami.