Jérôme Charbonnier, the fragment as raw material

Charbonnier's principle is sampling and assembling. He draws from a vast territory of images, salvages fragments from different times, from visual registers that would never have met elsewhere, and gives them a new shared existence. What you end up seeing isn't quite what you thought you recognized. It's something else, built on the edge of several worlds, and that's exactly where it gets interesting.

His work fits in a broad collage tradition, not the cut-and-paste of a summer notebook, but something more radical: a way to short-circuit the automatic reading of the image, to create a gap between what the eye identifies and what the brain finally understands. Charbonnier plays with that tension, stretches it, exploits it, makes it the engine of his compositions. The question he asks fits in one sentence: what if seeing was no longer recognizing, but recomposing?

The plant world as a visual alphabet

A large part of the work shown in Contre-Formes starts from plant matter. Autumn leaves, lily petals, white flowers, butterfly wings: small organic elements Charbonnier gathers, photographs, isolates on a black background and reassembles to give birth to figures that shouldn't exist. A fox rises from a pile of russet leaves. A silhouette hints between two corollas. The bestiary he brings up is built entirely from fragments that nature has never combined this way.

This approach isn't illustrative. It questions our reflexes: why do we recognize a face where there are only curves, an animal where there's only light and matter? Charbonnier's work plays with that reflex to better throw it off. What looked like a still life becomes a portrait. What looked like a portrait, seen up close, becomes an accumulation of petals again. The work shifts depending on the distance you stand at. An exhibition that promises two speeds, then: the sweeping gaze and the detail.

Contre-Formes: what you'll see and what you'll feel

The title says a lot. Contre-Formes is the idea of a resistance to the expected form, to the frame, to immediate legibility. In a world saturated with quick images designed to be consumed in a fraction of a second, Charbonnier's work invites you to slow down. The gaze doesn't settle, it searches. Imaginations rise where you didn't expect them, silhouettes appear, spaces open between the layers. The gallerist warns: here the gaze never fully strips down, and that's the whole point.

It's the kind of exhibition that doesn't reveal everything at once. You do a first round, you think you've got it, then you come back to a piece you'd skimmed and you notice something is happening you hadn't seen. A dead leaf becoming an eye, a corolla drawing a jaw, a vein tracing a shoulder line. For that, it's worth going in person rather than scrolling photos on Instagram. A rule that holds, by the way, for almost every show we cover here.

Galerie Magnetic, a place that matters on the Bordeaux scene

If you don't know Galerie Magnetic yet, this is your chance. Run since 2013 by Pôle Magnetic, founded by Pierre Lecaroz, the gallery is fully dedicated to Bordeaux's urban and contemporary scene. It supports emerging and established artists, produces original shows, street art walks in the city, educational programs for schools and curious visitors of all ages, and defends a real idea of art in dialogue with the street.

Hosting Jérôme Charbonnier in this context is coherent. His work on forms, fragments and times extends exactly the conversation the gallery has kept for over ten years between the street, the studio and the white walls of an exhibition space. And it echoes, in its own way, Arthur Cruz's show that occupied these same walls last spring: two painters who question the gaze, one through stubborn black and white, the other through plant recomposition. At the opening, you'll cross paths with collectors, artists, students, and people who won't quite know what they came to see. Often the best evenings.

Why go

because solo shows by a rising artist in Bordeaux are easy to miss,

because work on forms and fragments, seen large-format in person, has nothing to do with what you catch on a screen,

because Galerie Magnetic is one of the most solid spots on the Bordeaux contemporary scene, and an opening there is rarely a bad evening,

because it's free, there will be a drink, and you'll leave with a few images stuck in your head you won't shake right away.

Contre-Formes, Jérôme Charbonnier
Opening Thursday June 4, 7pm to 10pm
Exhibition until July 12, 2026
Galerie Magnetic, 16 rue du Faubourg des Arts, 33000 Bordeaux
Phone: 07 44 82 59 54
www.polemagnetic.fr
Free entry