In vitro, 2026

Thierry Bronchart  

At a time when ecological urgency is redefining our place in the world, Thierry Bronchart offers with “IN VITRO” a troubling and poetic visual reflection. Through a series of oil paintings depicting botanical greenhouses, he explores the fundamental duality inherent in our relationship with the living world: a simultaneous desire to protect and to control nature.

Architectures of glass and metal, the greenhouses here are more than simple pictorial subjects; they become metaphors for an "Anthropocene" era where humanity oscillates between the will to preserve ecosystems and the temptation to dominate them. Each canvas in “IN VITRO” captures this tension, between the fragility of the sheltered plants—cacti, ferns, or other delicate species—and the rigidity of the structures containing them. The reflections on the glass panes, sometimes blurred, sometimes sharp, blur the boundaries between interior and exterior, reminding us that the living world, even when placed under a glass dome, never allows itself to be fully tamed.

Thierry Bronchart attempts to make this ambiguity tangible. The greenhouses appear alternately as sanctuaries where biodiversity finds refuge, and as glass prisons where it is deprived of its own ontological essence—its role within its natural biotopes.

Transparencies and reflections through the windowpanes make the canvases windows where the inside and outside communicate through superimposed images. The oil painting technique, through successive layers of glazes playing on the transparency and density of the medium, allows the surface to translate the mirror effect of glass, troubling the viewer's perception.

Through this work, Thierry Bronchart materializes this tension and invites viewers to question themselves: are our efforts to protect nature—nature reserves, greenhouses, laboratories—not also means of isolating it, controlling it, or even denaturing it? At a time when we perceive the limits of a societal model whose impact confronts the very limits of the living world, he reminds us that nature is neither a backdrop nor an object, but a partner with whom we must learn to coexist, without seeking to dominate it.

An opportunity to discover how painting, through its evocative power, can illuminate the ecological issues shaping our present—and our future.