The next group show at the Centre d’art Madeleine-Lambert in Vénissieux is entitled Sur le motif. Taking literally this expression, which originally referred to painting “from nature, in the open air”, the title here is programmatic: the motif plays the leading role, whether coloured, geometric, decorative, flat or in volume.

The artists – Usama Alshaibi, Christian Babou, Amélie Berrodier, Nicolas Daubanes, Safia Hiros, Alessandro Piangiamore, Juliette Rey, Camila Salame and Keen Souhlal – come from different generations and different geographical backgrounds, and their work reflects a wide range of approaches, informed by their own artistic and aesthetic sensibilities. What they all have in common, however, is that their works here are closely linked by the question of motif, ornament, repetition and geometry.

In this way, the place of the motif in the creation and history of art is revisited, through iterations that take the form of videos, sculptures, multiples, paintings, wallpapers and ceramics, all inhabited by the complexity inherent in our perception, our cultural and personal references and our sensory experience of the motif.

Expressions that are at once abstract and charged with meaning, the motifs in the exhibition unfold their paradoxical presence between discretion and fascination, also becoming the crystallisation point for a myriad of memories, codes and sociological clues that they convey, resonating with our visual and emotional memory.

Photographs : Blaise Adilon. With works by Juliette Rey, Nicolas Daubanes, Keen Souhlal, Christian Babou.