Les Mangeurs d’étoiles

Albarrán Bourdais presents “Les Mangeurs d’étoiles”, Jeremy Demester’s first exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together paintings and sculptures, the exhibition unfolds through a body of work shaped by references to the folklore, oral traditions, and spiritual cosmologies of West Africa, particularly Benin, a country with which the artist has maintained a close relationship for many years.

Rather than proposing fixed answers or closed meanings, the exhibition invites viewers to engage with the works through intuition, perception, and sensory experience. In this sense, painting emerges not only as a means of representation, but also as a space of transformation and contact with that which remains beyond language.

Demester’s practice is built upon a deeply intuitive approach to painting. Marked by gesture, rhythm, and the layering of images, his works constantly oscillate between abstraction and figuration, constructing scenes in which bodies, symbols, landscapes, and organic forms appear fragmented, suspended, or in the process of transformation. Rather than following a traditional narrative logic, the images seem to arise from free associations, memories, spiritual references, and states of perception that expand painting into a territory closely connected to vision and ritual experience.

The exhibition brings together works produced across a variety of supports and materials—including canvas, steel, copper, wood, and paper—extending the artist’s pictorial practice into an increasingly physical and sculptural realm. Large-scale paintings on canvas are presented alongside works on steel and copper, carved wooden sculptures, and a series of sculptural objects that introduce a particularly significant material and ritual dimension within the exhibition.

In this context, materials occupy a central role within the artist’s practice. Metallic surfaces reflect light in constantly shifting ways, while carved wood and sculpture establish a more direct relationship with physical presence and the notion of the ritual artefact. Painting thus ceases to function solely as image, becoming equally object, body, and matter.

The exhibition’s title derives from Romain Gary’s novel of the same name, a key reference within the project’s conceptual framework. In the book, Gary explores the relationship between human beings, the cosmos, and the invisible forces that shape the world, constructing a narrative in which myth, spirituality, and destiny are deeply intertwined. That same dimension permeates Demester’s practice, where stars function as symbols of transformation, knowledge, and connection to that which lies beyond the visible.

Throughout the exhibition, recurring references emerge to the Tarot de Marseille, West African Vodun, literature, cinema, and various spiritual and esoteric traditions. However, these influences do not appear as direct quotations or illustrations of specific narratives. Demester absorbs them into a deeply personal visual language in which different cultural imaginaries continuously merge, overlap, and transform into one another.

Many of the works seem to inhabit intermediate states: between appearance and disappearance, between body and landscape, between physical presence and mental vision. Human figures partially emerge through layers of colour and gestural marks, while certain symbols and forms recur from one work to another as though they belonged to a shared system of internal correspondences. Rather than constructing closed compositions, the paintings remain open, allowing multiple readings and associations to coexist simultaneously.

The notion of passage runs throughout much of the exhibition. The works evoke suspended spaces, thresholds, and states of transformation in which different temporalities and forms of knowledge coexist in constant tension. In this context, the ritual does not necessarily appear as the representation of specific ceremonies, but rather as a mode of relating to images, to time, and to the act of painting itself.

This dimension becomes particularly visible through the presence of sculptures and three-dimensional objects, which function less as autonomous elements than as physical extensions of the symbolic universe developed within the paintings. Through them, the exhibition shifts the pictorial experience toward a more immersive and spatial environment, where image, object, and atmosphere remain continuously intertwined.

Far from offering a linear narrative or a singular interpretation, “Les Mangeurs d’étoiles” unfolds as an open system of visual and conceptual resonances. Each work functions as an autonomous fragment that, through its relationship with the others, progressively expands the universe of the exhibition. Through this network of associations, Demester creates a space where the everyday and the mythical, the intimate and the cosmic, the material and the invisible remain in constant dialogue and connection.