In vitro, 2023

Thierry Bronchart  

At a time when the ecological emergency redefines our place in the world, Thierry Bronchart proposes with “IN VITRO" a disturbing and poetic visual reflection. Through a series of oil paintings depicting botanical greenhouses, he explores the fundamental duality that inhabits our relationship with the living: that of a simultaneous desire to protect and to control nature.

Architectures of glass and metal, the greenhouses are here more than simple pictorial subjects; they become the metaphors of an “anthropocene" era where humanity oscillates between the will to preserve ecosystems and the temptation to dominate them. Each canvas of “IN VITRO" captures this tension, between the fragility of the plants housed—cacti, ferns, or other delicate species—and the rigidity of the structures that contain them. The reflections on the glass, sometimes blurred, sometimes clear, blur the boundaries between interior and exterior, and remind us that the living, even under a dome, is never entirely tamed.

Thierry Bronchart tries 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 glass, the canvases are windows where the inside and the outside communicate in superposition of images. The oil painting technique, through its successive layers of glazes, playing on the transparency and density of the material, allows the support to translate the mirror effect of glass and disturb the viewer's perception.

Through this work, Thierry Bronchart materializes this tension and invites the viewer to question: 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 life, he reminds us that nature is not 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 that shape our present—and our future.