Jean-Paul AGOSTI "Jardin Miroir"

From the 1970s onward, Agosti fully committed himself to painting. Settling within
the grounds of a former abbey in Gif-sur-Yvette, he began painting the surrounding
garden—an image that would become the founding motif of his work. For him, the
garden becomes a symbolic territory: a space of living architecture where mastery
and profusion, order and chaos, the visible and the invisible intertwine. Through
media such as watercolor in particular, he develops a vision in which several levels
of reality coexist, inviting the gaze to wander and penetrate the depth of the world.
A decisive encounter with mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in 1978 marked a
turning point. Fractal thought intuitively confirmed what his painting had already
sensed: a branching structure of reality, breaking away from Euclidean serialism to
open onto a hyperbolic space where forms unfold across different scales. Agosti
thus conceived a body of work based on mise en abyme, the constant shifting of
perspective, and variations of scale.
The figure of the Tree—structure, symbol, and organizing principle—became
omnipresent. In this universe, the image is at once architecture and growth,
memory and becoming. A baroque tension runs through his work: the desire to
order primordial chaos and reveal the secret coherence of the world.
This reflection gradually led him to expand his practice toward architecture, garden
design, and the art of stained glass. In collaboration with the Simon Marq studio, he
has in recent years created major monumental ensembles, notably the twenty-one
stained-glass windows for the chapel of Saint-Joseph College in Reims, as well as
several works for buildings in France and abroad.
Winner of the International Prize for Contemporary Art of Monaco in 1987 and
appointed Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2019, Jean-Paul Agosti
continues his work today from his studio in Joigny, in the Yonne region.
This retrospective offers a journey through the major stages of his research—from
the original gardens to fractal constructions, from works on paper to monumental
deployments. It reveals the profound coherence of a body of work that, beyond
techniques and formats, tirelessly questions our way of inhabiting space and
perceiving the world.