Opening Exhibitions Staring at the sun & Dany Albiach
Opening on Thursday, July 9, from 6:00 PM
staring at the sun
The 2026 Villa Arson Graduate Exhibition, entitled Staring at the Sun, invites us to “look the sun in the face.” It brings together a generation of artists who have chosen a form of lucidity that is both sharp and sensitive. Observing the tensions, flows, and paradoxes of the contemporary world, they translate their inquiries into aesthetic forms where materiality and language converge to imagine poetic and lived alternatives.
The exhibition unfolds as a three-part dialogue, three states of sensibility that respond to one another throughout the spaces. The first sequence confronts the structures and injunctions that shape our lives, exploring notions of control, norms, and repetition through the rigor of form and image. This formal tension gives way to a second phase devoted to margins and withdrawal. Here, the works become more intimate, favoring modest materials, fragile gestures, and personal narratives that inhabit interstitial spaces and re-enchant the everyday. Finally, the exhibition opens onto the stark light and vital energy of the outdoors, where artistic gestures engage with the elements to experience living processes and forge a deeper connection with the world.
Within this collective experience, artistic language itself becomes a tangible, raw material. The diversity of practices—from painting to installation, performance to video, as well as photography and music—creates a singular polyphony. Faced with the uncertainties of our time, these thirty-five voices do not offer dogmas or ready-made answers. By bringing their energies together, they instead create a shared space for reflection, where artistic creation becomes a site of vibrant and attentive emancipation.
Curator: Martha Kirszenbaum
dany albiach – là où le jour cède
Artist Dany Albiach conceives of art as a relational and existential space, capable of transforming his relationship with others, everyday life, and memory. A graduate of Villa Arson in 2024, he has developed a practice attentive to what may seem ordinary or insignificant, seeking to reveal its emotional and sensory depth. His works emerge as fragile attempts to preserve intimacy in the face of time, erasure, and disappearance.
Drawing on printmaking and drawing, his work is deeply influenced by the experience of insomnia, which infuses his compositions with intense blues and nocturnal depths, evoking silence, dreams, and diffuse memories. His artistic influences intertwine with the landscapes that have shaped his journey, from the shores and volcanic reliefs of Réunion Island to the maritime horizons of Nice.
Through twilight landscapes, reflections, and fragments of bodies or nature, Dany Albiach creates suspended spaces between fiction and reminiscence. His work invites contemplation and a form of quiet introspection, while maintaining a balance between personal experimentation and visual accessibility. By leaving faces indistinct, titles absent, and scenes deliberately fragmentary, he preserves an element of mystery, allowing viewers to project their own memories and emotions onto the works. In this way, his practice transforms the intimate into a shared and universal experience.
Curator: Pauline Vermeren
Practical Information
Opening on Thursday, July 9, from 6:00 PM
Free parking : INSPE, 39 Av. Stephen Liégeard, 06100 Nice
Free entrance