For his first solo exhibition at the Gallery Xippas, Yvan Salomone will present a collection of forty watercolours that have been pinned onto the walls of the gallery.
Yvan Salomone bases his work on photographs taken in situ at the port in Salomone’s native town of Saint Malo, in Rotterdam, in Shanghai and elsewhere. The introductory document is only informative; it is not a question of reproducing his images but of interpreting them. The choice of medium, liquid and transparent, confirms this motivation. Thus, when confronted with the weightlessness produced by the use of watercolour, the representation of the raw materials in these industrial sites undergoes a metamorphosis that lends a truly singular quality to the artist’s compositions. Yvan Salomone’s landscapes engender a poetic dematerialisation of reality and impose themselves on the viewer as suspended space.

Every watercolour is the subject of a text that the artist has chosen in consideration of the works. These are projected onto the wall of the gallery’s entrance.

Yvan Salomone was born in 1957 at Saint-Malo in France, where he lives and works.
In 1993-1994, the artist was invited by the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam to send a watercolour a week for 36 weeks. He has since participated in numerous exhibitions in institutions and galleries: the Musée de la Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland) and the Frac Limousin in 2008; the Frac Picardie and the Gallery of Marseille in 2007; the Baronian-Francey Gallery in Brussels in 2000 and 2005; Praz Delavallade in 2000 and 2003; and the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva in 2000.