Solo show | Pierre Dumaire
Exhibition
21.02.2026 — 28.03.2026
L'Heure fauve
Opening
21.02.2026 — 14h to 20h
DS Galerie is pleased to announce “L’Heure fauve,” the first solo exhibition by artist Pierre Dumaire at the gallery, curated by Kévin Le Squer, art historian and Head of Exhibitions at the Fondation Carmignac.
The opening reception, in the presence of the artist and the curator, will take place on Saturday, 21.02.2026, from 2 pm to 9 pm.
“Allongé sur l’herbe, le faune s’éveille, ne sachant plus s’il a rêvé ou non ce moment d’extase avec les nymphs. In a bedroom, beneath the gaze of icons pinned to the wall, the movements of an adolescent hand reveal a still-shy sexual identity. Under the camera’s eye, 1970s floral wallpaper blushes modestly before a homosexual pornographic scene, while in the distance the forest becomes the intimate cocoon of two men entwined after lovemaking. “L’Heure fauve” is Pierre Dumaire’s first solo exhibition, interweaving the intimacy of the bedroom, adolescent fantasy, and cruising sites in the open air. Nourished by gay pornographic cinema of the 1980s and by the sensual aura of the faun as performed by Nureyev(1)—two themes that inhabit the artist’s work—the exhibition probes the duality of bodies between poetry and bestiality. Here, time is suspended, images ripple across silk, men become faint memories, and representations of nature spread throughout the gallery space.”
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(1) Afternoon of a Faun, choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky (created in 1912 for the Ballets Russes, music by Claude Debussy, after the poem by Stéphane Mallarmé), revived by Rudolf Nureyev for the Royal Ballet, London, 1967
Excerpt from the exhibition text by | Kévin Le Squer
Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna, and the École Duperré, Pierre Dumaire develops a pictorial practice that explores ambiguous spaces, traversed by latent narratives and a tension between visibility and concealment. Drawing on an iconography rooted in gay visual culture, his work is characterized by the use of painting on silk, silkscreen, and printmaking, lending the works a melancholic and expressive tone.More info
An art historian specializing in contemporary art, Kévin Le Squer is Head of Exhibitions and Off-Site Curator at the Carmignac Foundation. He has been involved in the development of exhibitions and publications at the Villa Carmignac since 2019 and served as associate curator of the exhibition “The Infinite Woman” in 2024, alongside Alona Pardo. Since 2022, he has curated a parallel program for the Foundation, consisting of artistic invitations for project spaces and performances. He previously worked on the conception of the exhibition “Olafur Eliasson, Objects Defined by Activity” at the Espace Muraille art center in Switzerland (2018) and was in charge of cultural programming at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (2016–2017).