On franchit le seuil de l’exposition et le corps ralentit. Les murs s’effacent derrière de grandes figures assises, frontales, qui nous observent. L’espace cesse d’être une simple galerie ; il crée une présence qui nous absorbe. L’ensemble rappelle la tradition des grands cycles peints de la Renaissance italienne, où les corps enveloppaient le spectateur et transformaient la peinture en expérience spatiale. Ici aussi, la peinture devient un lieu où l’on entre et où l’on demeure. L’installation fonctionne moins comme une succession de tableaux que comme une mise en condition du regard, pensée à l’échelle du corps. La dimension architecturale traverse plusieurs projets récents de Charles Bitton, où cloisons, panneaux autoportants et circulations, transforment la peinture en environnement habitable plutôt qu’en simple surface accrochée. L’œuvre ne se contente pas d’occuper un lieu ; elle organise l’espace, dont on devient partie prenante.
Dans l’appartement florentin où vit et travaille l’artiste, des personnes, connues ou non, viennent prendre place dans le même fauteuil en rotin. Elles s’assoient, maintiennent une posture, demeurent un moment dans la lumière. Cette scène est filmée, vient ensuite le travail pictural. L’alla fresca impose un rythme rapide et irréversible : c’est dans le geste, que la peinture trouve sa grâce. Héritée de la tradition italienne, cette technique inscrit l’œuvre dans le temps même de son exécution.
La peinture ne reproduit jamais l’image filmée : elle la déplace, la transforme et la réactive. Entre l’expérience vécue, son enregistrement et sa traduction picturale, quelque chose se défait légèrement. Ce qui apparaît sur la surface relève moins d’une restitution fidèle que d’une reconstruction sensible, traversée par le souvenir. Ici, on retrouve certaines orientations de la peinture figurative contemporaine, notamment Luc Tuymans et Michaël Borremans, où l’image ne cherche plus à restituer fidèlement le réel mais à faire émerger la trace d’une expérience vécue. L’œuvre ne se limite pas au visible, elle repose sur un protocole composé de plusieurs étapes - poser, enregistrer, peindre - qui ne coïncident jamais totalement. La peinture devient le lieu de leur rencontre. Elle rejoint ce que Rosalind Krauss décrivait comme un « champ élargi », dans lequel le médium cesse d’être autonome pour entrer en relation avec le corps, le temps et le dispositif.
L’économie de moyens s’accompagne d’une attention remarquable portée aux sujets représentés. Enfants, adultes, animaux, plantes, objets semblent soumis au même régime du regard, à la même intensité. Aucun paysage ne vient véritablement situer ces figures. Le dehors demeure absent, là où la tradition italienne inscrivait encore le corps dans un monde. La palette participe pleinement de cette tension. Quelques couleurs seulement, issues de la terre toscane : ocre, rouge sourd, vert profond et brun. Cette restriction volontaire, presque austère, fait vibrer les surfaces et déplace discrètement la figure hors du strict réalisme. Les teintes s’entremêlent ; le vert affleure dans les ombres, le rouge traverse les chairs, l’ocre capte la lumière sans jamais la fixer complètement. Les couleurs construisent des présences instables, comme si chaque peau conservait la mémoire diffuse d’un autre temps et d’un autre lieu, et pourtant en présence.
Comme l’a montré Georges Didi-Huberman, certaines images tiennent précisément dans cet « anachronisme actif », où des temps disjoints persistent ensemble, où plusieurs temporalités coexistent. Le modèle de la fresque porte un temps long, historique ; les corps et les visages appartiennent à l’instant. C’est dans cette tension que réside la puissance de cette installation. Aussi, lorsqu’on quitte l’exposition, les figures continuent d’accompagner notre mémoire, au point qu’on ne sait plus si elles appartiennent à la peinture ou à notre propre histoire.
– Barbara Cuglietta
In Charles Laib Bitton’s paintings, nothing seems to try to dominate the scene. Children and adults sit on the same rattan chair, at the same height; animals, plants, and objects are arranged one after another on a studio stool. The floor—terracotta tiles—becomes a canvas for an almost geometric composition. All the figures appear against a light-colored wall, bathed in soft, natural light. All are rendered in a restrained palette, at times evoking the Italian Primitives, with a consistent economy of means. They are observed with equal attention, as if each presence were equivalent and demanded the same degree of patience and openness from the viewer.
This way of observing the world is reminiscent of the quiet attention Robert Walser paid to the most humble things. For the Swiss writer, walking, observing, or pausing before an ordinary detail becomes a way of inhabiting reality with intensity and humanity. Bitton’s paintings stem from a similar sensibility: they reject grandstanding and favor a relationship with the subject that requires a certain duration, a gradual adjustment of the gaze.
This apparent simplicity and closeness to the subject is, however, accompanied by a certain opacity. His figures are neither portraits in the strict sense nor archetypal representations. Rather, they appear as intermediary presences, emerging from a combination of observation, memory, and invention. Their slightly veiled gaze, as if held back behind the surface of the painting, echoes Richard Marienstras’s description of the Golem: a creature almost human in appearance, whose strangeness is betrayed only by a slight alteration. The figures painted by Bitton possess something of this ambiguity. Is it because they carry within them a certain incompleteness, the same mutilation as the Golem? Motionless and pensive, adopting the traditional postures of melancholy and rendered with touches of verdaccio, they gaze toward the viewer; familiar, yet never quite graspable.
The brushwork itself remains open, at times loose, allowing a degree of indeterminacy to persist. Rather than capturing his subjects through photography, the artist works from videos, seeking presence rather than a specific pose. His “qualityless” figures (that is, devoid of heroism) nevertheless lend a particular quality to the space they occupy. Their discreet and restrained energy places them at a certain distance that is not one of superiority but of modesty.
Bitton’s work thus goes against the grain of a visual culture saturated with fast-paced, instantly comprehensible images. Instead, it embraces a form of minimalism. In this almost monastic simplicity, the painting becomes a focal point. In some respects, it brings to mind the meditative simplicity of Fra Angelico, with whom he seems to share a similar artistic rigor.
What is at stake in these works is perhaps not so much the representation of a subject as the emergence of a presence—fragile, attentive, always somewhat elusive—that can only be approached through a patient gaze. To those who are willing to linger, these paintings gradually offer a form of silent familiarity, like an invitation to slow down and, over time, experience a different way of seeing.
– “L’attention des images”, Gatien DU BOIS
We enter a gallery of larger-than-life portraits. A young woman, a man, a cat, a plant - each creature is given the same visual value, perhaps the same weight. No hierarchy distinguishes them, they co-inhabit as the elements of an ecosystem, as bit players on a film set, as the characters of an opera chorus.
All the human figures are seated on the very same cane chair posed on the very same tile-floor. They seem to gaze at us from an intimate place, a private cabinet perhaps, where moods are allowed to flow and thoughts to wander. Their gaze is at once fierce and introverted, present and absent, provoking an unsettling, uncanny experience. As onlookers, we are reminded of our own physical body - perhaps vicariously standing for the artist’s agency - acting as a performative, crystallizing entity within this display of characters.
From Untitled, Florence, 2025 to Untitled, Florence, 2026, the titles of the paintings span the sequence of a year’s work in the artist’s Florence-based studio. Stemming from this specific moment and place, Charles Bitton conceived a site-specific, global installation, portraying both the human and non human elements he daily interacts with. The nameless models evoke as much the contingency of their existence as the elusiveness of the captured moment in time.
If art is a thing of the mind - cosa mentale - as Da Vinci suggested, Bitton’s paintings and their very matter convey atti e moti mentali - mirroring perhaps both the model’s and the artist’s attitudes and motions of the mind. Embodying a third party, the viewer acts as the moving tip completing a virtual triad.
Embracing a subtle richness of nuances, the oil paintings are surprisingly all made with a limited color-palette of four pigments. This constraint seems to be part of the artist’s intent to work with a set of simple rules allowing him to create a unified ensemble: a limited set of dimensions and colors, converging towards a quasi religious Trinitarian symbolique. And indeed the portraits are surrounded by frescoes holding a motivic, abstract shape, envisioned by the artist as the symbol of a unified life on earth.
As for the course of the paintings after the show at the gallery, a precise protocol has been designed to allow both the acquisition of each painting separately, and the reuniting of the installation as a whole - notwithstanding its scattering in space and time - thus preserving the possibility of its unity.
– “Theatrum mundi”, Tania Nasielski
After evoking the human figure through the formal abstractions of his previous works (the exhibitions Éveil passager, Romantic Imagism, and I Told You When I Came I Was a Stranger), as though opening a window onto the mysteries of the human soul, Charles Bitton now continues his search for what is essential: the relevance of gesture and of the present moment. His aim is to break the spell of illusion and the omnipresence of the virtual in our society, and, through a restorative rupture, respond to the urgency of the senses and emotions — those emanating from bodies deeply grounded in physical, calm, and benevolent reality.
To paint what exists relentlessly and without embellishment, in all its diversity, multiplicity, obvious presence, corporeality, and infinite softness, within the simplicity of everyday life. To restore life to sensation through line and through the urgency of liberated pictorial gesture — vivid, incisive, instinctive, uncompromising, and without revision. For the artist, it is about recreating a connection with the greater whole, with universality itself, by celebrating the coexistence of humanity, the animal kingdom, the plant world, and material existence.
An object, a body, a friend, a child, a pet… They are there, displayed, standing before us, illuminated by the same light at the precise moment of the creative act, suspended in the strength of the instant, and connected through the magic of warm chromatic harmonies: tonal variations of greens, reds, yellow ochres, siennas, and burnt umbers — undoubtedly inspired by the painting of the Italian Renaissance and the Florentine countryside where Charles Bitton has lived for the past four years.
What are they thinking? What do these strange and silent witnesses, frozen in the moment, expect from us? Emerging from the painted canvas, seated on the same chair, in the same place, linked by the brick-red ceramic floor — immutable and silent, yet undeniably alive — they stare directly at us with the force of their frontal presence. They inhabit this same working space, this studio, this place of memory, like a gallery of gigantic portraits and silhouettes reigning within a patrician residence from another era, traces of whose imaginary architectural décor reappear in the scenography conceived by the artist.
This wandering space is at once singular and multiple, replicated, open yet enclosed, universal and personal, endlessly staged in all its dimensions — real and dreamlike alike — drawing its intrigues and mysteries from Florence’s past. In these melancholic gazes, by turns disillusioned, amused, dreamy, searching, questioning, and frontal, there is a meditation on inner dialogue, now and forever, on presences and absences, on intimacy alternately concealed or revealed to us passersby.
– Béatrice van SCHENDEL