For his third exhibition at Galerie Xippas, Yves Bélorgey will present new paintings and drawings (from an ongoing series entitled Kyoto) made over the course of 2009, following his residency at the Villa Kujoyama in Japan.
For over fifteen years, Yves Bélorgey’s representations of urban landscapes have cast a critical eye on the edifices and modern architecture of the 1960s, representing them with a brutal frontality and exposing the social organization that conditions the urban system of the “banlieue,” the notorious Parisian suburbs. Bélorgey confronts collective architecture in a documentary method, according to its many potentialities for particular expression: he paints these landscapes both as places in which the “social body” undergoes training, and as an inventory of forms in which the “corpulent” presence of the surface of his canvases infallibly recalls the historical gauntlet of Modern painting.
The subject mater exhibited is not limited only to Bélorgey’s work in Japan—recent buildings and urban landscapes from the Parisian suburbs are also present, in an attempt to transcend geographic, national or esthetic criteria and thus permit a Japanese impression to resonate among them…like the harmony of a musical instrument. The paintings evoke once again the polemics of Modernism, and in particular, Modernity’s relationship with tradition in a country where the most functional architecture integrates vernacular formal elements that are sometimes surprising. Bélorgey also devotes particular attention to concerns of space and surface. As opposed to in Europe, the concept of a delimited space does not exist in Japan: the Japanese notion of space changes in relation to the view-points from which it is perceived from a static perspective. It is thus an intrinsically temporal space. In his paintings, Bélorgey clarifies and prolongs the connection between history and architecture, and simultaneously between these two and the concept of landscape, enabling him to broaden his perspective of architectural masses to integrate into his paintings elements of the juxtaposing environment, and thus addressing more closely issues of representation, of mater, and of rhythm.
For his solo-show, Bélorgey has invited the sound artist Atsushi Nishijima, encountered during his stay in Kyoto, to include several of his works. This proposal can symbolize affinities between art forms and between artists, and further hints at the relationship to otherness that results from a distancing from Japan, be it cultural or geographic, and a differentiation of medium. Atsushi Nishijima approaches sound as a means of apprehending invisible phenomena. In a delicate balance between humor and pedagogy, the strange sonorous objects search to valorize traditional Japanese thought—thought related to time in which the slowing down, the near decomposition, is source of creation.

Yves Bélorgey was born in 1960; he lives and works in Montreuil, France. In 1993, during a residency in Marseilles, he begins his paintings of architecture. His work can be found in numerous public collections. In 1999, he had a solo-exhibition at the MAMCO, Geneva. In 2004, he paints the first paintings of a “renowned” architectural work, that of Jean Baudrie. These paintings were exhibited at La Box, Gallery of the Fine Arts School of Bourges and at the gallery of Noisy-le-Sec ; he was included in the exhibition « Modern©ités » at the Grand Café in Sant-Nazire along with Karina Bisch, Damien Mazières and Lisa Milroy. In 2005, Bélorgey had a solo-exhibition at the art center of Vénissieux, and was included in the exhibition “archipeinture “ at the Plateau/Frac Ile de France and at the Camden Arts Center, London.