Liste Basel
Clémentine Bruno
18.06.26 - 21.06.26Click here to access the list of works
NICOLETTI is pleased to announce its fourth participation in Liste Art Fair, Basel, with a solo exhibition of new paintings by French artist Clémentine Bruno (1994, FR), the most recent addition to our programme.
Rooted in painting but also including sculpture, print and installation, Bruno’s practice examines the systems of representation that have shaped Western art history – from religious iconography to landscape painting and modernist formalism. Her work tracks the persistence of something unique in transient historical forms, reducing symbols and allegories to their elemental expressions as physical gestures and linguistic signs. Through analysis, citation, and decontextualisation, Bruno’s compositions reveal presence in otherwise void spaces, conjuring spectral forms and elusive imagery that question conditions of presence and absence in visual representation.
At Liste, Bruno presents a new suite of paintings developed through a lengthy process of layering and burying images beneath successive layers of gesso – a mixture of calcium carbonate and animal-hide glue that dates back to ancient Egypt and later became central to medieval and Renaissance painting. Applied to oak panels sourced from an Italian manufacturer of religious icon boards, gesso functions as both surface and substance: oil paint is repeatedly deposited, sanded away, and reapplied in alternating cycles, generating a dense material history within each panel.
Through this technique, Bruno stages a continuous negotiation between figure and ground, appearance and disappearance. In her work, visible forms often seem on the verge of dissolving back into the material from which they arise. Universal emblems such as matchboxes and stars partially emerge from strata of gesso and pigment, yet remain tethered to the wood surface beneath. What becomes visible arises from an entropic blur rather than a definitive contour, prompting a meditation on the fundamental condition of objects and images: emergence, transformation, decay, and return. Bruno describes these compressed layers as a form of “painted geology,” where multiple temporalities coexist: the duration of her labour, the historical time absorbed from other paintings, and the excavatory gestures that reveal or conceal earlier decisions.
The chromatic range of her new works intensifies this tension between material permanence and visual instability. Earthy browns, eggshell whites, and dense blacks – colours associated with natural matter – are sometimes combined with artificial washes of neon pink and acid green. Beneath both palettes, gesso asserts itself as the originating material: the white ground from which colour and form emerge and to which they may ultimately return. Painting here is less an act of definitive image-making than a dynamic cycle of deposition, abrasion, and reappearance.
Bruno’s presentation also engages the history of formats and pictorial conventions. Panoramic and portrait-oriented panels unfold together as a kind of coded visual syntax, suggesting a language whose meaning remains unstable. This relationship within material condition and linguistic formalism at work in Bruno’s paintings extends the legacy of Georges Bataille’s concept of the “formless” which, in its later development by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, opens a space in which painting resists clarity and the will to define.
Altogether, Bruno’s paintings propose an archaeology of forms and meanings, where images persist not as stable representations but as unstable residues. Establishing a dialogue between the ritualistic, mystical function of painting and the conceptual rigour of abstraction, Bruno’s presentation at Liste proposes a meditation on how images persist, decay, and return, inviting viewers to consider painting not as a fixed object, but as a dynamic site where time itself becomes visible.