Stéphane Belzère⎜The painter’s colorful thoughts. The origins and richness of the stained glasses of the Rodez Cathedral

A place of experimentation and dialogue between contemporary art and Christian spirituality, Galerie Saint-Séverin dedicates its showcase to Stéphane Belzère for three months.

Guest curator and art historian, Brother Marc Chauveau has gathered artworks that belong to the iconographic vocabulary used by the Franco-Swiss painter when he designed seven stained-glass windows for the Rodez Cathedral in 2006.

Winner of the competition launched by the DRAC (Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs) and the diocese, Stéphane Belzère responded to the specifications by choosing "a more meaningful symbolic approach than illustrating narrative and easily identifiable episodes", daring to "borrow iconography from our contemporary world, particularly from the biological or medical world", according to Brother Marc Chauveau.

In the bay The Creation of the World, Genesis is evoked by embryonic forms floating in a blue liquid, like the four Brain-Plants watercolors displayed which convey the mystery of life. These anatomical elements come from his series of jars of animal organs, painted in situ at the Museum of Natural History in Paris in the 1990s and 2000s, and recently featured in a major exhibition at the MAMCS in Strasbourg.

Traditional iconography is also renewed "in the stained-glass window of the sacraments, where red blood cells of Christ, like a chain of DNA, link the sacraments that irrigate the life of the Christian from baptism to extreme unction". To represent God at the top of the stained-glass windows, Stéphane Belzère drew "on the medical register of our contemporary world by using an MRI image of a brain, the seat of intelligence, thoughts, and the impulse to love. A contemporary image in an attempt to symbolically depict the unrepresentable".

The exhibition is completed by two Color Chart that remind us that color, its effects of light and transparency, are at the heart of Stéphane Belzère's work.