Exhibition - "Ancrages–Encrages"

Didier Mir, a retired schoolteacher, is a multimedia artist from Montauban and a student of the sculptor Flavio De Faveri. For a long time, his work has centered around drawing, the artist's favorite medium. A great believer in serendipity, a practice that allows for the unexpected, he produces original and unpretentious works. He also practices watercolor, oil painting, photography, engraving, olive wood carving—a symbol of "Mediterraneanism"—and even produced a bilingual French/Occitan book and a 52-minute documentary of the same name: Les Inaudibles, ed. Edite-moi!, 2021. Occitan, the mother tongue, a gateway to the Romance world, holds a central place in Didier Mir's work, whether implied in the subject matter or explicitly conveyed by the titles of the works. In the exhibition Anchors – Encrages, the artist offers two avenues of exploration for his particularly rich and abundant visual work. First, his oils on canvas express the desire for anchoring in time, in generations, for transmission. But anchoring also involves the imagination, literature, and stories—here, Les Contes du Drac by Jean Boudou. These guiding principles are found in two series of oil paintings presented, Figures and Dracs.
Second, inking bridges literature and visual work, between copperplate engraving and printing. The engravings and watercolors presented are original illustrations for a collection of poems by Robert Lafont, set to music and sung by Eric Fraj (Parle a un pòble, book CD éd. Trobavox 2024), as well as three of the artist's books, in which text and image maintain a close dialogue: Fumée sans feu, éd. L'Aucèu Libre 2021, Mapping a Dream ed. Edit me! 2021 and The Inaudibles ed. Edit me! 2023.

Show less