Curated by Jean-François Chevrier and Élia Pijollet

Saint-Pierre Church in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region in France, dedicates a personal exhibition to Yves Bélorgey, Sous-bois.

For more than thirty years, Yves Bélorgey painted “building paintings”. Collective housing estates were the exclusive subject of his artistic practice and research. In recent years, however, a new motif has emerged in his work: the forest. This shift began around 2020 through his exploration of garden cities (in Germany, the Paris region, Los Angeles, and Detroit), to which he dedicated several series of paintings.

Today, his work investigates the relationship between trees and buildings, vegetation and the built environment, architecture and the forest, with the concepts of dwelling and habitat as a backdrop.
How can painting give form to these questions?

During two stays in Corrèze (April 2020 and April 2025), he visited several forest sites around Tulle, including the Forest of Remembrance, planted thirty-two years ago at the initiative of Peuple et Culture in memory of the victims of 9 June 1944. Back in his studio, he began producing a new body of paintings and drawings. Six large-scale paintings (2.40 x 2.40 m) will be presented this summer in Saint-Pierre Church.