Clément Bataille develops a practice—spanning painting and ceramics—marked by discretion and tension. A graduate of the École du Louvre, trained as an art historian, he draws on art history—particularly that of the Italian Primitives—as a pictorial memory that he bends, recomposes, and unsettles. He creates figures inhabited by an ambiguous, carnal sense of the sacred, where religious memory, erotic corporeality, and contemporary mythologies intertwine. His works, permeated by silences and vivid colors, question the limits of representation and the persistence of belief. In the words of Clément Raveu: “[…] Far from seeking to dismantle these dogmas, Clément Bataille revitalizes them by confronting them with our present time. This materiality gives his works a particular density, evoking a long durée in which history merges with ruin, where devotion becomes imperfect, even ephemeral, at the threshold of dream and memory.” The material itself—cracked, imperfect—becomes a surface of sedimentation, through which time can be sensed. Rejecting the obvious, Clément Bataille constructs a fragmented fresco, both archaic and contemporary, in which each piece functions as a sensitive enigma to be deciphered.
Clément Bataille’s works have already been presented in several exhibitions, mainly in France and across Europe (Paris, Saint-Denis, Marseille, Milan, Berlin), as well as in Mexico City. He illustrated the short story Journal d’ascétisme by Émilien Rouvier, published by Éditions du Chemin de Fer, Paris (2023), along with numerous other journals. He was selected for the 68th Salon de Montrouge in 2024. Following a collaboration in the gallery’s salon exhibition in 2024, Rosaire, Clément Bataille will present his first solo exhibition at DS Galerie in 2026.