EVO Gallery is pleased to present the first show with the French couple Jugnet + Clairet. Recent transplants to Santa Fe from Europe, Anne-Marie Jugnet and Alain Clairet work collaboratively in a wide variety of media including painting, sculpture, photography, and neon. Their imagery stems from observation that is mediated and abstracted in varying degrees.

For Beau Fixe (fair skies), Jugnet + Clairet will present several related bodies of work inspired by their many trips to the Southwest before relocating to the region. This rich cultural landscape is addressed in a way that responds directly to the best known elements of New Mexico and the Southwest – the desert landscape, brilliant skies, the atomic bomb – while simultaneously negating it. Anchoring the show is a series of color field paintings based on the seemingly cliché southwestern sunset, which has been re-ordered into bands of interacting color. While clear referents to natural phenomena, the geometric compositions were actually inspired by a Malevich painting.

A series of cloud sculptures, based on photographs taken in Santa Fe, were executed in Carrara marble by Italian craftsmen. These take on the appearance of three-dimensional anime clouds interacting with the flat, color field sunsets. Minimal watercolor paintings conflate mesas with mushroom clouds. And in the Monument Valley series, eight spare line drawings executed in monochromatic blue-white neon are at once descriptive and minimally abstract. In all of the works, the source material is coolly altered, but never obliterated. Beau Fixe not only translates as the idiomatic “fair skies” but also implies capturing and fixing an ideal beauty.

Jugnet + Clairet have shown extensively in galleries and museums across Europe. They will be the subject of a large retrospective in Luxembourg at the end of this year. This is their first show in Santa Fe. EVO Gallery is located across from SITE Santa Fe in the Railyard District.