For its fall exhibition, Mouvements Modernes has partnered with Vestige to present the work of painter Jenna Bitar, set within a bold interior featuring contemporary design and iconic pieces from the 1980s and 1990s of the Néotù gallery collection.

The friendship between the French and New York-based curators, Manon Canto and Snow Guilfoyle, gave rise to Vestige, a transatlantic agency shaped by their shared vision, instinct, and belief in art. Operating between Europe and the United States, Vestige creates the context, relationships, and strategic framework that facilitates an artist’s work to reach further, resonate more deeply, and leave a lasting impact.

Jenna Bitar is a contemporary Franco Lebanese artist born in Paris and raised in Bali. This dual cultural background, combined with a childhood immersed in tropical landscapes, profoundly shapes both her perspective and her artistic practice. She has developed a distinctive visual language inspired by aerial views of the Earth, where geological formations, oceanic topographies, and organic structures converge.

Her work explores the connections between the microcosm and the macrocosm, revealing the recurring geometries that run through all living things, from the veins of a leaf to river networks as seen from above. Working with materials derived from natural sources and following a largely intuitive process, Jenna Bitar approaches painting as a space where intention and emergence coexist. Her compositions invite slow, immersive contemplation, offering a sensory reconnection with nature and the rhythms that shape it.

For this exhibition, Jenna travels back in time. We leave the surface of the living world to descend into the Earth's crust, towards sedimentation, stratification, and geology.

Her paintings acquire a new dimensionality through tones, depth, and textures reminiscent of stone built up over millennia, punctuated by eruptions that evoke a mineral consciousness. Rock is the memory of millions of years condensed into just a few centimeters of material, as the Scottish geologist James Hutton might have suggested. It is this contemplative sense of deep time that resonates throughout Jenna Bitar's work.

Furniture, too, is a form of memory, that of an era. It bears the imprint of its creators, of designer craftsman collaborations that reflect a society, its customs, its aesthetic sensibilities, and its freedoms. Materiality and texture form the common thread running through the dialogue between the paintings and the furniture, whether in the carved oak surfaces of Fabien Petiot's pieces or the hammered ironwork of Garouste & Bonetti.

The resemblance between the glazed lava tabletops of Rena Dumas's Robinson collection and the richly textured surfaces of Jenna Bitar's paintings is striking.

Like basalt or obsidian, the volcanic stones found along Australia's eastern coastline where the artist spends much of her time, the materiality of Jenna Bitar's paintings draws us into a meditation on geological time, inviting us to travel back through the ages while offering a profound sense of calm in the face of such immensity.