Marc Desgrandchamps exhibits at the Museum of Fine Arts in Dijon

"At the limit of the imperceptible": the Museum of Fine Arts in Dijon retraces ten significant years of the "master of evanescence", Marc Desgrandchamps, one of the most noted contemporary French painters of his generation.

"My figures are between shadow and light, something extremely fragile, on the edge of the imperceptible," the artist explained on Tuesday when presenting the vast exhibition of 47 works dedicated to him by the Burgundy museum.

Marc Desgrandchamps, 60, is one of the most internationally known contemporary French artists. The Center Pompidou exhibited it from the age of 27 and, since then, it has been presented in particular in Bonn, Beijing, and at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris during a major retrospective in 2011.

It is in the period following this year that the Dijon museum is interested in its exhibition entitled "Silhouettes" in the ghost characters which are the artist's signature. Frédérique Goerig-Hergott, chief curator and director of the museums of Dijon, remarks: "His characters are crossed by the landscape behind the painting, without their managing to cover it".

These transparent silhouettes translate the "uncertainty" of the situation, underlines the artist, like the painting Un Matin au temps de la paix where the lightly drawn body of a young woman at the edge of a peaceful lake contrasts with the advent impending war in Ukraine. “I work more in echo, with felt impressions, than in direct representation,” he adds.

Nourished by references to Antiquity, cinema, literature, and philosophy, the works of Marc Desgrandchamps play on "fragmented representations", such as headless bodies or parts of horses, "which bear witness to the broken vision I can have people," he said.

Marc Desgrandchamps will be exhibited until August 28 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Dijon and then at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Marseille.