Galerie Templon

Galerie Templon launches its new season with the first solo exhibition by Belgian painter Matthieu Ronsse within its Brussels premises. A singular figure on the Belgian contemporary art scene, Matthieu Ronsse has, for over two decades, cultivated an organic and uninhibited painterly practice. His work seamlessly weaves together abstraction and figuration, classical references and contemporary gestures, in a jubilant and unrestrained approach to form. As art critic Guy Gilsoul notes, references to Rembrandt, Titian and Velázquez infiltrate his paintings like a “Trojan horse, to force open the gates of our mental citadels.” The exhibition brings together a previously unseen selection of around twenty paintings of various formats. Titled Hotel Prado—in reference to a local hotel in his neighbourhood in Ostend, the Belgian coastal city where he lives and works—the show offers a fleeting fragment of Ronsse’s intimate universe: a slice of life unveiled for a few weeks within the gallery’s walls. The artist transforms the exhibition space into an extension of his studio, where chaos is transfigured into visual poetry. Ghostly figures, fragments of memory, and gestural traces converge on the surface of the canvas, bearing witness to an ongoing process—art in a constant state of flux, resisting all fixity. Into this evolving visual language, Ronsse introduces newer artistic references, notably American artists Paul Thek and David Hammons, as well as Colombian artist Oscar Murillo, underscoring the richness of his eclectic vocabulary. Ronsse’s oeuvre unfolds as an expansive pictorial discourse in which experimentation and the sheer joy of creation hold centre stage. His paintings embrace incompletion. None of his exhibitions is ever static; transformations may occur over time, revealing a dynamic and fluid approach to making. For the artist, the finished image is not the goal—what truly matters is the ongoing act of creation. Each painting becomes simultaneously a surface, a trace, and a tool: it is its own palette, bearing the imprints of its making and the deliberate accidents that infuse it with raw, intuitive energy. Ronsse rejects the notion of a predetermined curatorial path. Instead, he allows the works to present themselves spontaneously—welcomed in their raw, unmediated state.

Exactly three years after his exhibition Right to the Soil, Right to Dream , Omar Ba returns to Galerie Templon ’s New York space with a compelling ensemble of approximately thirty new and previously unseen works, signalling a defining moment in the artist’s practice. Recently established in New York, Ba now positions his work in direct engagement with the city’s cultural and political landscape—a shift palpable throughout the exhibition, which navigates the tensions and affinities between local rootedness and transatlantic resonance. Oscillating between Dakar and New York, Ba unveils a body of work informed by his attentive exploration of the historical and contemporary ties between African communities on the continent and the African diasporas of North America. Deeply imbued with the texture of this American context, his paintings probe overlapping memories, shared legacies, and the often-unseen bonds of diasporic kinship. Executed in a range of media—including acrylic, oil, pencil, Indian ink and Bic pen—Omar Ba’s canvases depict striking portraits, both bust-length and full-figure, that appear to emerge from void-like grounds, suspended within richly layered pictorial spaces. Some meet the viewer’s gaze with a disarming directness, drawing us into their contemplative presence. While his earlier oeuvre was populated by chimerical, hybrid beings, this new series embraces an unprecedented realism—manifested through frontal, pared-down figures that speak with quiet intensity. The visages on display carry the weight of a shared transatlantic history. They embody the aspirations, struggles, disillusionments and enduring hopes of a fragmented yet culturally united diaspora. Through these works, Ba invokes a subterranean sense of fraternity—one frequently overshadowed by political divisions and identity fractures, yet persistently alive. Rather than emphasising discord or separation, Ba chooses to illuminate resonance and proximity, offering a vision of dignity and possibility. It is a call to build solidarity through recognition of what binds rather than what divides.

To inaugurate the new season, which in 2026 will mark its 60th anniversary, the Templon Gallery is presenting this autumn a unique project with Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck. For the first time since the opening of its Grenier-Saint-Lazare space in 2018, the artist has been invited to take over both Paris locations, including the historic venue at 30 rue Beaubourg. Following the conclusion of Nocturnal Journey, Op de Beeck’s critically acclaimed institutional solo exhibition at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, On Vanishing showcases a cohesive collection of recent and new sculptures, watercolors, and an animated film.

Recently honoured by a major exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, entitled Empreintes , French painter François Rouan is now the subject of a new show at Galerie Templon in Paris. Nearly twenty major works unfold an oeuvre that can be rediscovered, in the words of Alfred Pacquement, as “possessing a density and depth rarely encountered along the pathways of contemporary art.” From the outset, Rouan was associated with the Supports/Surfaces movement, though he never adhered to it fully. His singular approach led him to deepen the pictorial gesture through collage, and, from 1965 onwards, through the invention of weaving (tressage). In the 1980s, his exploration of new media – photography and film – prompted him to broaden the field of painting, deconstructing traditional pictorial structures in order to reinvent them. The exhibition brings together primarily paintings from the Transis and Recordas series. In the former, executed in wax, forms emerge from within reiterated motifs like vestiges of memory, transforming each work into an apparition, a kind of indelible shroud. In the latter, Rouan meticulously weaves fragments of canvas, producing a surface both literal and symbolic. Colours interlace with intensity; forms recur with stubborn insistence, even as the painted surface persistently unravels. Nothing reveals itself at first glance: the work demands a patient, ever-renewed engagement. Through this interplay of borrowed elements and imprints, François Rouan composes an oeuvre of pronounced palimpsest character – what Daniel Sibony has described as a “magnificent meditation on the texture of existence.” This formal and spiritual rigour situates him among the foremost abstract painters of modernity.

TEMPLON is proud to present a new immersive exhibition by CHIHARU SHIOTA , from November 6, 2025, through January 22, 2026, the artist’s second solo show in NEW YORK . The exhibition ECHOES BETWEEN invites audiences on an immersive journey into the universe of Chiharu Shiota. The Japanese artist unfolds her renowned web-like installations, reinventing thread as a poetic and universal medium. After studying painting in Kyoto, Chiharu Shiota turned away from the medium to explore performance art. Her search for new forms of expression brought her to Germany, where she eventually began using the materials and techniques that would express her artistic voice the best. Thereby, turning to installations, creating vast, ephemeral environments. Through a subtle weaving of knotted threads, she constructs striking scenographies that integrate objects imbued with memory: window frames, discarded musical instruments, suitcases, keys, books, and second-hand garments. Her monumental installations -now emblematic of her practice – have been exhibited in museums worldwide, forming a singular body of work that explores notions of existence, memory, and transcendence. With Echoes Between, Chiharu Shiota delves into the realm of death, a liminal space where consciousness drifts and transforms. Around two chairs, thousands of luminous threads form a radiant cloud, like a shower of living particles, evoking a continuous dialogue between the real and the imaginary. In The Soul’s Journey, Shiota saturates the space with red threads, creating an organic, hypnotic immersion into the depths of consciousness, an infinite skein where memories and emotions intertwine. Remaining faithful to her formal investigations, she also presents thread-filled boxes, delicate reliquaries of memory, alongside her Infinite Lines – canvas works that transform the web into a sensitive surface, as if it were skin itself.

For the very first time in Belgium, GALERIE TEMPLON is proud to present HERVÉ DI ROSA in its Brussels space with the exhibition IDOLÂTRIES. This second chapter of a cycle initiated in Paris with Idoles et trésors confirms the vitality of an oeuvre which, for more than forty-five years, has sought to dismantle disciplinary boundaries and to reconcile popular culture with the legacy of art history. A central figure of the French artistic movement Figuration Libre, Di Rosa invents worlds where the grotesque contests the marvellous, where comic strips cross paths with the shadow of Brueghel, where African sculpture enters into dialogue with the Flemish Renaissance. In Brussels, he irreverently revisits Brueghel’s monumental cycle of the seasons: snowy landscapes, fairy-like ruins, and chimerical architectures become the stage for an unbridled mythology, saturated with colour and populated by jubilant, often trivial figures. The exhibition extends beyond painting: ceramic sculptures created in Cameroon and Portugal are presented alongside vast canvases, abolishing any hierarchy between image and object, fine arts and so-called minor arts. In this deliberate polymorphism, Di Rosa scrambles the maps of artistic orthodoxy and reaffirms the legitimacy of all forms of expression. A great traveller and keen observer, he summons memories of Mexico and Cameroon as readily as the visions of Piranesi or Hubert Robert to weave a fractured narrative, stripped of moral constraints. At the hour of the “twilight of the idols,” the artist from Sète seeks “to reconnect with grand painting” and to assert himself anew as a reinvented master of landscape.

For his first exhibition at TEMPLON in PARIS , Malian artist ABDOULAYE KONATÉ , a leading figure of the contemporary African art scene, unveils a new ensemble of ten monumental, entirely hand-sewn works. ... By weaving together Western prosperity and African spirituality, his work outlines the fabric of a necessary reconciliation, carried by the beauty and power of color.