American artist Ethan Murrow uses film and photography to create farcical, theatrical narratives that are then translated into large-scale graphite drawings. These beautifully rendered drawings capture a sense of adventure, satire, fun and defeat. The absolute confidence and passion of Murrow’s characters stand in contrast to the possibly dubious outcomes of their efforts. “The entire ethos of the work revolves around the idea of falling back in love with plants. In a time of deep sickness and upheaval I have found solace and calm in the plants that surround me and this work is meant to celebrate those simple pleasures and essential elements in our lives. Recently, I have spent a lot of time reminiscing about the hours I used to spend in the woods and fields, growing up on a farm in Vermont. No joke, I used to see if I could hide from my brother under piles of pine needles for hours at a time and would spend precious moments spacing out in the grass, avoiding the burdens of things like shoveling manure.”

Thomas Lévy-Lasne is Graduated from Les Beaux-Arts de Paris, and a former resident of the Villa Médicis (2018-2019). Parties in watercolours, protests in charcoals, erotic webcam drawings, oil paintings of urban solitude, he approaches the most diverse and contemporary subjects in a classical manner. Thomas Lévy-Lasne celebrates the fact that there is something rather than nothing. Without being ostentatious, his work shows us that we can take the contemporary world by the arm and become part of art history.“The distanciels series are portraits of relatives contacted by computer in charcoal on paper. Alone in the night, lit by the computer screen, I tried to reconcile their mood, also that of the connection quality, in the middle of our adventure of interdependence that we are finishing going through.”