From May 15 to July 5, 2026, the Clément Foundation in Le François will host three solo exhibitions dedicated to painting. Mickaël Bé Caruge, Fred Eucharis, and Hector Charpentier present distinct artistic worlds, all driven by the same question: how does the canvas give form to what eludes the eye?.
Three exhibitions, three pictorial languages, a single field of exploration. By presenting works by Mickaël Bé Caruge, Fred Eucharis, and Hector Charpentier simultaneously, the Clément Foundation offers not so much a survey as a dialogue.
All three artists, each in their own way, explore the tension between figuration and abstraction, between the material applied to the surface and what it seeks to bring into being. Painting emerges here as a mental space as much as a physical one—a place where the transition from the visible to something else is negotiated. It is this common thread, rather than the mere proximity of dates, that gives the season its coherence.
Mickaël Bé Caruge: Dreams as a Workshop
In *Rêve diurne*, Mickaël Bé Caruge makes dreaming a guiding principle of his work. Dreaming, the artist reminds us, means letting one’s thoughts and imagination wander—an act whose Latin root, *vagus*, refers to that which wanders. In painting, these sometimes unattainable visions become raw material—what the artist calls the “salt of the earth” of his utopia.
The exhibition explores several avenues. The fading and coexistence of images serve as a principle for deconstructing dreams. The emphasis on a scale that transcends the body or the detail opens the door to wonder. Finally, the diffuse quality is conceived as an active and positive dissolution. A body that is no longer quite human, a shift through time and space, the evocation of the tenuous thread between life and death already depicted in the Greek myth of the Fates: these are all thresholds that painting makes possible to cross. For Bé Caruge, the dreamlike realm encompasses all deconstructed or absurd manifestations, beyond the intelligible world, and it is from this that he derives an aesthetic model.
Fred Eucharis: From the Visible to the Essential
The title of Fred Eucharis’s exhibition says it all. The painter presents simplified, tactile works set against undefined, abstract backgrounds—the culmination of several years of practice. His artistic exploration, he explains, has been ongoing since he was fifteen: experimenting with both figuration and abstraction, the richness of colors and forms, and observing his surroundings to grasp their secret mechanisms.
2025 – Acrylic on canvas, 110x110 cm – Photos: Robert Charlotte
A Caribbean artist, he places the light of his island and the harmony of Caribbean scenes at the heart of his work, drawing inspiration from opera, jazz, Noh theater, and Caribbean music. He openly acknowledges his artistic influences—from Kandinsky to Roland Chanco, from Maurice Estève to Diego Rivera and Picasso—without bowing to trends, as he seeks to synthesize the currents of contemporary art. In his work, the medium is worked like a rich paste, applied gently or in bold strokes, to create a warm and vibrant palette.
Hector Charpentier, Figurative Abstraction
Hector Charpentier presents *Intemporelle, a Time for Herself*, based on a concept he developed in the early 1990s: “figurabstraction.” This concept offers a critical response to the historical opposition between figuration and abstraction by refusing to force a choice between the two.
Her paintings reveal an image built up in successive layers, in which the human figure—most often female—occupies a central place. It serves as a sensory anchor point, around which chromatic fields and abstract structures unfold. These elements interact without hierarchy, opening the work to an interpretation that is at once visual, symbolic, and conceptual. The viewer’s gaze moves between the visible and the invisible, between the presence of the motif and its transposition into a spiritual space. Through this approach, the artist questions the very conditions of representation and affirms painting as a space of synthesis between matter, spirit, and memory.
The same threshold
From one exhibition to the next, a common thread emerges. The dream in Bé Caruge’s work, the essential in Eucharis’s, and figurative abstraction in Charpentier’s: three ways of holding together the figure and its overflow, of turning the canvas into a threshold rather than a surface. The Clément Foundation is adding to this, through June 28, the group exhibition *The Collection Comes Out of Storage!*, which extends the exhibition with a selection of works from its collection.
Practical
The three exhibitions will be on view from May 15 to July 5, 2026, at the Clément Foundation, located on the grounds of Habitation Clément in Le François. Admission is free, daily from 9:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Guided tours are offered every Wednesday at 4:30 p.m., as well as tours tailored for young visitors.
Philippe Pied & Roland Dorival
