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Artist: Isidore Bishop-Sauve

Sobering Galerie presents Isidore Bishop-Sauve’s first solo exhibition. At just 25 years old, the artist has already developed a highly distinctive pictorial language, in which intimate, sensitive figuration meets a loose, direct, and spontaneous handling of paint.

For this new body of work, Bishop-Sauve takes, among other sources, Joseph Losey’s film *The Go-Between* (1971) as a point of departure. In it, he finds themes that resonate deeply throughout his practice: the loss of innocence, the transition into adulthood, masculinity, the desire for intimacy, and the difficulty of making oneself fully accessible to another person.

His male figures are never quite self-portraits. Rather, they function as possible doubles - projections through which the artist explores the construction of identity, a sense of belonging, and the constant tension between the desire to reveal oneself and the instinct to remain protected. His subjects often appear caught in transitional moments: absorbed, contemplative, vulnerable, at times almost absent from themselves.

The fragility of these figures contrasts with a painting style that remains intensely alive. Bishop-Sauve does not seek to smooth or resolve the image. His brushwork stays visible, fluid, and at times almost sketch-like. Forms emerge through flat areas of color, rapid gestures, passages left deliberately open, and shifting textures. In both his portraits and interior scenes, this freedom of execution creates a particular sense of immediacy, as though the image were preserving something of the moment of its emergence.

Color also plays a central role. Drawing in part from the greens and whites of *The Go-Between*, the palette places the bodies in tension with their surroundings. Nature becomes at once a refuge, a space for projection, and a site of solitude; the city, meanwhile, appears as the territory of a desire for connection, but also of the difficulty of achieving it.

From one canvas to the next, however, the figures seem to respond to one another. Isolated within their own spaces, they gradually form a kind of silent community. They move closer, turn away, conceal themselves, expose themselves. This succession of gestures and retreats gives the exhibition an almost narrative dimension, without ever imposing a single story.

For his first solo exhibition, Isidore Bishop-Sauve brings together a body of work that operates as much as a fragmented self-portrait as an observation of a generation. It is a painting of in-between states: between proximity and distance, confidence and vulnerability, the desire to be seen and the need to disappear.

all images © the gallery and the artist(s)