If the title of French artist Stephane Calais’ solo show at Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain sounds like a happy augury for a Breton autumn traditionally marked by capricious skies, it should rather be read as the ambition to awaken the place with colors and lines. There are, indeed, in this pictorial installation sort of an emergency to embrace the space, to fix his first experience of this former as wide as low ceiling loading dock, introduced by the monumental Patio with concrete beams supporting a glass roof. If it were necessary to make an analogy, it seems likely than areas on the ground floor invested by Stéphane Calais are to be looked at in perspective as an Italian theater. In two phases and one very show, the Patio flies into a cloud of colorful shapes that defy its balance in a gravitational ballet while a black mural sweeps the depth of Le Quai in a pure painterly tradition. American art critic Clement Greenberg defined Jackson Pollock’s painting as volatilizing the object, creating this incorporeal weightlessness that could only transmit its effect abstractly. One can obviously use his critical perspective to define Stephane Calais’ proposition for Brest as his free forms act directly on the structure of the venue to allow the viewer to escape from the architectural weight.

Le nouveau printemps makes the exhibition space become a physical experience that images will likely have much trouble to figure. Everything here comes from notions of scale :  excessive when the artist suspends its forms in the Patio, human when his dazzling gesture scarifies the space or domestic in the subtle fragility of his paintings on paper.

Using mediums as various as painting, sculpture, murals, silkscreen or daily life objects, Stephane Calais’ work proceed by references mix. His sophisticated and nevertheless trivial approach deals with the 20th century art blockbusters with as respect as critic. His nouveau printemps refers to avant gardes experiments like El Lissitzky’s Proun Room, 1923 which defied the logic of academic display by underlining formally spaces’ specificities.

Paradoxically, at Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, the pattern that fills the walls, put the space bare. Its abstraction has a triple function of scale, revelator and constraint of the space. The motif circles, limits and opens in the same resolute and relentless gesture.