Lavoir Vasserot exhibition - Hidden beauties

At the Lavoir Vasserot in Saint-Tropez, Olivier Mas presents a selection of works from two of his major series: "Beautés cachées" and "Cézanne et moi".

This exhibition compares contemporary representations of women with revisited landscapes, in a dialogue between grids, geometries and colorful vibrations.
Hidden Beauty" series

In "Beautés cachées", Olivier Mas transposes photographs of models and actresses from fashion magazines into paint, integrating them into abstract, geometric backgrounds. This transition from glossy paper to paint erases realism and transforms the models into distanced, almost sacred images, while underlining the "object" nature that society projects onto these bodies.
The colors, often built on contrasts of warm and cold, reinforce this sense of ambivalence: sensuality and distance, presence and effacement coexist in the same image.

"Cézanne and me" series
With the "Cézanne et moi" series, Olivier Mas engages in a dialogue with Cézanne's heritage and the landscape of the South. The aim is not to illustrate Cézanne, but to take up certain issues - construction through color, tension between planes, simplification of forms - and transpose them into a more contemporary language, punctuated by geometries, cut-outs and superimpositions.
Echoing "Hidden Beauty", the structure of the landscape can also be perceived as a kind of mental grid: a way of organizing reality, breaking it up to better release its energy and light.