Idir Davaine, Baume Chérie: LES GRANDES SERRES DE PANTIN - 1 RUE DU CHEVAL BLANC, 93500 PANTIN

This new series originated in the Sainte-Baume massif, where the artist spent several days exploring remote, overgrown areas, some difficult to access. As is often the case in his practice, Davaine begins by walking the terrain: photographing, taking notes, and collecting forms and impressions. Above all, however, he retains from this experience the feeling of having crossed into a world apart.

“I retained the impression of having crossed a sanctuary, a kind of liminal territory where diffuse presences rest.”

The Sainte-Baume itself embodies this ambiguity. A forested massif as much as a place of pilgrimage, it is home to the cave where, according to Christian tradition, Mary Magdalene is said to have withdrawn from the world. This sacred and funerary dimension permeates the exhibition without ever becoming its literal subject. Rather, it resonates with a longstanding reflection in Davaine’s work on landscape as a space of projection: a territory in which fragments of reality — vegetation, rock, paths, shadows — can gradually shift into something else.

Baume Chérie thus unfolds as a journey in several stages. In an initial series of paintings, the viewer is immersed in the heart of dense, tangled vegetation. The compositions are gestural and profuse, offering almost no distance from the subject: branches, masses and colours accumulate until the landscape becomes difficult to decipher. The aim is not so much to depict the forest as to convey the physical experience of moving through it, as though the painting itself were seeking a passage through this matter.

Gradually, the space opens up. A second series moves away from the observed landscape to reveal a more inward territory: an underworld of more expansive compositions, built from broad fields of colour punctuated by signs — crosses, vegetal or mineral fragments, sinuous lines and isolated forms. These elements are scattered throughout the paintings like landmarks on a map whose legend has been lost.

“For me, these paintings are like fragments of maps, torn apart and then reassembled.”

The experience of the Sainte-Baume is overlaid with other narratives of passage. The stories of Orpheus descending into the Underworld and Dante, guided by Virgil through the realms of the afterlife, accompany the artist throughout the making of the exhibition. These references do not give rise to a narrative iconography; rather, they surface within the paintings as mental structures, nurturing ideas of passage, loss and orientation in a world whose rules elude us.

Between these large-scale works, Davaine develops a third series of small paintings depicting bouquets of withered flowers. Produced throughout the process, between two large canvases, they punctuate the exhibition like moments of respite. These bouquets become modest offerings left along the way, fragile markers that might help the traveller, pilgrim or adventurer find their way again — much like the pebbles in Hop-o’-My-Thumb. Their presence introduces another temporality into the exhibition: that of things that wither and disappear, yet nonetheless leave a trace.

The title, Baume Chérie, brings together the different layers of this journey. First, it refers affectionately to the massif from which the series emerged. But the word baume also evokes the substance applied to the body to soothe, heal or perfume it, and from which the French verb embaumer (to embalm) derives. Historically made from plants, resins and aromatic essences, balm thus brings us back to vegetation and the forest, while evoking notions of care, fragrance, preservation and death. This shift between meanings encapsulates the exhibition’s underlying ambivalence: a landscape that is at once profoundly alive and haunted by what is no longer there.

With Baume Chérie, Idir Davaine continues to develop a painterly practice situated at the intersection of experience and memory, figuration and abstraction. Landscape is never a fixed backdrop; it is traversed, fragmented and recomposed until it becomes a mental space. Painting thus acts as an uncertain map, intended less to show us where we are than to accompany us in the possibility of losing our way.