COMMON GROUND: Bryce Delplanque, Morgane Ely, Gabrielle Kourdadzé, Louis Lanne, Mathilde Lestiboudois & Nils Vandevenne.

Galerie Prima brings together six artists from the same generation: Bryce Delplanque, Morgane Ely, Gabrielle Kourdadzé, Louis Lanne, Mathilde Lestiboudois, and Nils Vandevenne. They share a studio at Poush, in Aubervilliers—a place of work and life that has become the center of an ongoing dialogue between their practices.

Last June, a fire destroyed their studio. This event was not the motivation behind the invitation, but it gives it a special resonance: both in the gesture of inviting the group and in the works themselves, where the ordeal sometimes seeps through the materials, motifs, or tones.
The exhibition mainly explores what connects these artists: a shared ground of influences and visual correspondences. In the studio, each one finds in the other’s gaze an echo of their own research—an open space of exchange and aesthetic contagion.

The exhibition bears witness to this circulation of forms and ideas.

Morgane Ely (born 1995, graduate of Beaux-Arts de Paris) presents an engraving based on an old portrait of Dolly Parton, a figure she connects to Bryce Delplanque’s work. Both draw from American popular culture, with all its directness and kitsch. Morgane works with woodcut, introducing trompe-l’œil effects and faux wood patterns. She speaks of “an idea of collaboration, citation, and collage,” where the image arises not from fusion but from juxtaposition—from a dialogue between references.

Gabrielle Kourdadzé (born 1995, graduate of ENSAD) works on a wooden panel cut “according to certain outlines of the image” she depicts, creating “a hybrid, almost sculptural surface.” She paints on it with ink and oil, composing from fragments of images taken in the studio, where Zigzag and Cooper, the dogs, have become familiar figures. She evokes “the way our gaze constructs the world around us, through tangled lines, overlaps, and empty spaces,” and speaks of “a symbolic reference to the fire” through a burnt yellow wash.

Louis Lanne (born 1995, graduate of Beaux-Arts de Paris) brings painting down to the scale of the object. He presents a series of small paintings inspired by Fantin-Latour’s bouquets, already explored by Bryce. “I used these bouquets as a drawing base, which I then reworked in paint,” he writes. On wooden panels framed in glossy black Formica (a nod to Nils’s materials), he composes images where the delicacy of flowers meets the materiality of their support.

Mathilde Lestiboudois (born 1992, graduate of Beaux-Arts de Paris) joins this network of correspondences by reinterpreting “the black-and-white vertical weave present in Morgane’s work” to insert her own motifs: drapery and column. “These forms, set in a silent space, extend my reflection on presence and absence.” The interplay of black and white with color reveals multiple temporalities, like layers of representation.

Bryce Delplanque (born 1993, graduate of Villa Arson) reworks a burnt page from Learning from Las Vegas, a relic of the fire. “The pages were burnt, but the image remained visible—antique statues before Caesar’s Palace, white columns under neon light.” This motif becomes the starting point for a painting where real and imagined ruins intertwine—those of Rome, Las Vegas, and the studio itself. Echoing Mathilde Lestiboudois’s architectures, Bryce reuses the classical column as a figure of survival and illusion, spanning eras until it becomes casino décor. “It’s not a restoration, it’s a record of loss,” he writes. Between history and simulacrum, his painting seeks what endures “like an image that passes through fire and continues to look back at us.”

Nils Vandevenne (born 1995, graduate of Villa Arson and Beaux-Arts de Paris) closes the circle with an openly appropriative gesture: “For as long as I can remember, I’ve always stolen elements from other people’s practices.” He embraces this “theft” as a method—a space for exchange and hybridization. “I stole Gabrielle’s paper technique, Bryce’s color atmosphere, Louis’s forms,” he writes, thus drawing a true image of the group: a porous ensemble, where each one grows through the gaze of the others.

This exhibition brings together the traces of a vanished studio and the forms that survived it. It shows how, within a shared space, influences become material—and how loss, far from closing a story, opens another.