Jeremy Demester

Galerie Max Hetzler

By Jens Asthoff

In his ninth solo exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler, Jeremy Demester once again put the focus on a sublime and mystical nature. The artist, who has lived mostly in Benin for the past ten years, was born in 1988 in Digne-les-Bains, France, and grew up there. He described the ten pieces in this fairly intimate show, “Shepherds’ Play,” as forming “fragment by fragment the memory of a childhood spent in Provence.” If his pictures revisit places of his childhood, then they do so across a considerable distance in time and geography, from a very different scenery and cultural setting. It is this distance that makes Demester’s art a kind of Proustian recherche, an archaeology of atmospheres, temperaments, and states of being.

His paintings devise subtly abstract translations for such landscapes of memory—while typically anchoring them in specific places. The titles of three medium-format works in acrylic on copper, Passage de Barles, Visite de l’ange et du chien à Archail (Visit of the Angel and the Dog to Archail), and Passage des Dourbes, all from 2024, for instance, point to villages around Digne-les-Bains. The titular locale in the large-format Le Tremble à Courbons, 2024, is a borough of Digne that is apparently home to a prominent trembling or quaking aspen, a tree whose leaves respond to the softest wind with a characteristic rustling. Demester often bases his motifs on such vivid sensory experiences, when, as he writes, “the movements of the air give rhythm and voice to the branches and leaves of the aspens; to the wild grasses and thistles, the air is filled with the powerful scent of rosemary and slate earth. I paint these moments when the wind seems to take the whole landscape in its hand to throw it in my face.”

Painting on copper, an old-master technique that Demester has practiced for some time, endows the pictures with a special radiance. The copper ground occasionally flashes through the paint layers; in Passage de Barles and Passage des Dourbes, for example, it combines with warm ochers and earth tones. These two are traversed by flickering and undulating vertical bands of color: reddish browns, smoky blues, luminous yellows. The intertwined bright and nocturnal tones evoke the experience of gazing into the campfire after a long hike, representing “what I see in the flames, of this nature that has been imprinted on me,” as Demester puts it. Le Tremble à Courbonsspeaks a similar visual language: The aspen billows like a flame, its furrowed bark extending into the branches in tapered blue wavy lines interwoven with sinuous white leaves.

Essence Concrète, 2024, strikes a sharply different note: The octagon of shimmering copper avoids all anecdotal specificity; its topmost surface is painted in an almost monochrome reddish beige. Under changing light, the meditative color space created with special lacquers reveals surprisingly varied hues, including cerulean. In this way, its sensory abstractness gestures toward manifold natural shades.

The painterly execution and, in some instances, the titles of five watercolors enhanced with pastels suggest Demester’s studies in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, as in Étude d’après C. Monet, 2023, and Étude d’après l’école de Pont-Aven, 2023. For works of this type, Demester first paints in dark-toned watercolors to produce fields bounded by rounded edges, then elaborates the shapes with dry pastels in luminous colors to create enigmatic landscapes bathed in darkness. The dense and delicate lines and spots celebrate the imagined vitality of an imagined nature on the verge of resolving into abstraction.

Translated from German by Gerrit Jackson.