Carré d’Art – Museum of Contemporary Art is dedicating a major exhibition to Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, whose collaborative practice, developed over more than twenty years, directly questions the conditions of painting’s existence in a world saturated with images. Their work seeks neither to preserve the medium nor to assert its purity, but rather to expose it to excess, collision, and dissonance.

Drawing on a wide range of iconographic registers, including landscape, portraiture, still life, abstraction, advertising imagery, and scholarly references, the artists compose paintings traversed by multiple layers, interruptions, accidents, and parasitic gestures. The images are taken, moved, superimposed, sometimes altered to the point of near disappearance, producing constant tensions between figuration and abstraction, recognition and loss of reference points.

This logic of dissonance, which is always variable, runs through the entire exhibition, immersing us in the intimacy of the artists’ studios and in an empirical practice where painting functions as a system whose rules are constantly shifting. Styles contaminate each other, emotions shift, motifs circulate from one work to another. Sentimental scenes borrowed from post-war imagery, landscapes riddled with latent catastrophes, floral motifs, abstract gestures, and pictorial fragments coexist in a deliberately unstable proximity. Painting, omnipresent, acts as a critical tool, humorously questioning a certain established order, the hierarchy of tastes, and the seductive power of images.

Refusing any definitive definition of the medium and constantly testing its limits, Tursic & Mille extend painting into space through cut-out panels, burnt wood, works on paper, offset plates used as palettes, and autonomous fragments of color. Painting thus spills over the canvas, stepping outside the frame to become an environment, blurring the boundaries between image and object, surface and material.

Rooted in the history of painting while constantly challenging it, their work offers a visual experience in which nothing remains stable. Dissonances à géométries variables invites the viewer to traverse an unstable pictorial field, made up of friction, contradictions, repetitions, and displacements, where painting does not represent the world but questions its contemporary forms, affects, and tensions.