It is in the apartment of the 18th arrondissement, where he settled at the end of the 1970s, that Peter Marcasiano unfolded, day after day — often at night — a stripped-down and luminous painting, attentive to the humblest of forms. On unstretched canvases, small frames, or sheets of paper, his compositions, with their restrained, often muted palette, laid down in thin, almost translucent layers, return stubbornly to the same motifs — onions, fish, flowers, pomegranates… In 1960, a few years before moving to Paris, a gallery in Salzburg devoted a solo exhibition to him. It would be the only one during his lifetime. The works he painted later in Paris never left his apartment until his death.
To present this work today in a gallery devoted to the emerging scene is to broaden the field of vision. Not to look back, but to welcome what his work tells us now, without nostalgia or filter. Remaining outside established narratives, Marcasiano’s painting reveals itself as contemporary in the truest sense: a presence experienced in the present. To bring his canvases into relation with those of Victor Gogly, Maude Maris, Hamish Pearch, Victor Pueyo, Maxime Testu, Milène Sanchez, Nils Vandevenne, and Zohreh Zavareh is to inscribe his gesture within a living community.
These artists are not merely guests: they become accomplices. Gathered in a shared space, they compose a sensitive fabric where the works nourish one another. Noir Métal contributes to this interplay through the furniture it designs — tables, stools, easels, consoles, floor lamps — which furnish the exhibition and create a domestic atmosphere, a space for encounters. The title of the exhibition borrows from one of Marcasiano’s handwritten notes, one of those sentences scribbled on small index cards: “My Onion Canvases are Ballet ____ The other canvases are also Ballet.” One can read in it an invitation to movement, to harmony, to a plurality of voices intertwining. A canvas never exists alone: it comes to life in the bond it weaves with otherness.
There is something moving in imagining Marcasiano walking through this exhibition. His canvases, long confined to the intimacy of his apartment, encounter for the first time the company of other works. Inspired by Masaccio, he painted in fidelity to ancient forms, apart from avant-gardes and fashions. Withdrawn, his painting found no immediate place within its time. Yet it is in this distance that its strength lies: today it reveals itself with a renewed intensity. Perhaps he would have smiled upon seeing his work welcomed into this company, touched to witness how deeply it resonates with a generation of artists, happy to find in it material for long conversations.