In 2013, Galerie du Centre in Paris devoted a major solo exhibition to GRATALOUP. Organized by Alain Matarasso, a gallerist who had supported the artist’s work for many years, the exhibition offered a comprehensive overview of his artistic practice and recent developments in his research.

Located in the heart of the Beaubourg district, Galerie du Centre had established itself as one of Paris’s leading venues for artists whose work evolved independently of prevailing trends and artistic fashions. The longstanding relationship of trust between Alain Matarasso and GRATALOUP found a new expression in this exhibition, providing visitors with the opportunity to discover the evolution of an oeuvre developed with remarkable consistency over several decades.

The exhibition brought together a significant selection of paintings and mixed-media works illustrating the principal themes that run throughout the artist’s work: the memory of civilizations, the transformations of nature, the invisible forces that animate the universe, and the profound connections between humanity and the cosmos. Through the use of pigments, metals, sand, and a wide variety of materials, GRATALOUP developed a distinctive visual language in which matter itself becomes a bearer of memory and meaning.

Neither abstract nor figurative, his painting inhabits an intermediate territory where forms emerge, transform, and interact with light. The works presented in the exhibition reflected his ongoing quest to make visible what ordinarily escapes perception: the energies, rhythms, and correspondences that connect all living beings and the world around them.

Documented in a film produced by Sophie Carreau for the Audiovisual Resources Center of ENS Cachan, the exhibition remains an important record of a significant moment in GRATALOUP’s career. The surviving images preserve the installation, the diversity of the works on display, and the atmosphere of an exhibition that confirmed the artist’s position as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary French art.

This exhibition formed part of the long-standing collaboration between GRATALOUP and Alain Matarasso, whose unwavering support helped bring wider recognition to an artistic vision founded on the dialogue between matter, light, symbolism, and spirituality.