What a treat to see Romain Bernini develop into a true talent in the art world.
Most of us didn't see his exhibition this summer in a castle near Toulouse. But his newest exhibition, Woods, in his Parisian gallery, provides the visitor with a veritable walk in the forest, with 8 - 10 large-scale depictions of trees providing you with a physical immersion in his creative environment.
Then there's a clearing, and you enter into a world where average, jeans-wearing, soft-around-the-middle contemporary men have donned the masks of a tribal yesteryear, while the wolves howl around the perimeter, with only a ramshackle outbuilding to demarcate the wild from the civilized.
How is it, his works seem to ask, that I/we have come to this place, where the savage, the effervescent life of the woods, the mystical communion with wild energy, is disintegrating before our eyes?
Upstairs, we were enchanted by smaller works, including a lovely snowy owl, and the always welcoming gallerist Suzanne Tarasiève herself, and her crew.