Dieu c’est-à-dire la Nature

The exhibition brings together the works of Joachim Perez and Laurent Goumarre around a shared question: how do images produce forms of belief?

In Joachim Perez’s work, this question unfolds through textile. His pieces place in dialogue two seemingly distant iconographic worlds: Christian imagery and the spectacular visual culture of Mexican lucha libre. Yet both share a similar dramaturgy of the body, where faith, performance, and the construction of heroic masculine figures converge. Using silhouettes made from old fabrics - often repaired and reworked - the artist allows the materials’ previous lives to surface. Marks of use and gestures of repair disrupt the legibility of the images, introducing a sense of fragility and softness that contrasts with the spectacular and heroic dimension of these figures.

In Laurent Goumarre’s work, the reflection on the image takes the form of an almost philosophical experience. Beginning with Spinoza’s famous formula Deus sive Natura, the artist lingers on what lies between the two: the moment of the “that is to say,” as if it were an injunction to articulate the world through images. Photography becomes a gesture of revelation. From the medieval paintings of the Petit Palais in Avignon to the landscapes of Arles, Goumarre seeks the instant when an image imposes itself with clarity like a visual epiphany in which everything suddenly seems to be expressed.

Between textile and photography, the works presented in the exhibition explore different ways in which images emerge: as collective narratives embedded in popular symbols, or as intimate experiences of revelation. In both cases, they question how images carry, shift, and transform our beliefs.