Centre d’arts plastiques Fernand Léger

420 nanomètres

Anne Goyer 

May 7 – August 31, 2026

 

The Fernand Léger Art Center presents a new and unprecedented project by Anne Goyer, the culmination of fifteen years of research into the creation of a non-pigmentary structural blue. An internationally award-winning painter, the Avignon-based artist has, since the beginning of her career, developed the architecture of a painting composed of white, translucent, and black materials that reproduces the atmospheric phenomenon of Rayleigh scattering—an effect that had already been intuited by Leonardo da Vinci. In her work, color is not applied: it appears. It is not an object laid onto the surface but a perceptual event.

 

Within a deeply phenomenological approach, (blue) color occupies a singular place for the artist, functioning as a gateway to the perception of reality and raising fundamental questions about the world. Color exists simultaneously in the eye, in the object, and in the light that passes between them. Optical and philosophical research apprehend color through its complex relationship with the constitution of the universe, extending even to matter itself.

 

To grasp the vibratory quality that light infuses into color, the artist moves away from figuration in order to better reveal the wave within blue monochromes—works that recall, in some respects, those of Pierre Soulages. Here, the intention is not to refer to the decomposition of the light spectrum but, on the contrary, to emphasize its absorption—here, in blue.

 

Anne Goyer develops an art of the un-situated (“what are we looking at?”), in which the opposition of elements (matter, color) gives rise to the emergence of light and the creation of an intense vibratory sensation. This pigmentless blue, made of reflected light, acts as an inverted metaphor of painting: it is a form of refinement, even stripping away, in which the gaze is held in suspension. A tension unfolds between matter and the immaterial, between the rigor of gesture and the fragile appearance of a sign emerging from the invisible.

 

Presented overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, the exhibition poetically and sensitively establishes connections between astrophysics and oceanography through the scientific parallels in the revelation of blue within our environment.

 

centrefernandleger.com

 

Informations

 

Address: 1 Av. Général de Gaulle, 13110 Port-de-Bouc