Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Le beau danger, Dove Allouche’s second solo exhibition with the gallery in New York, featuring new works from three different series.
The Paris-based artist works in photography, drawing, and printmaking, often employing scientific processes to bring to light otherwise invisible phenomena. In the words of French philosopher Michel Foucault (a short text by whom is also the source of the show’s title), Allouche mines “the invisibility of the too visible.”
In the three series on view here, Allouche explores the question of how art breaks the surface of reality. Though formally abstract, the works result from his empirical investigation into nature, its immanent order amidst the dreadful chaos of the modern world.
Allouche made the works in the Sunflower series in complete darkness like our Paleolithic ancestors painting in dark caves. He scatters pure silver and tin onto large Cibachrome sheets, sweeping his hand from left to right across the surface, then exposes them to light to reveal reflective halos that correspond to his arm span.
From complete darkness to extreme light: 6 million Kelvin flaring regions is a series of pencil and ink drawings based on photographs of solar flares that are imperceptible to the naked eye. Their halos—which visually echo those of the Sunflowers—represent a mixture of gases that occur at a particular wavelength. Allouche frames each drawing with a unique sheet of blown glass, the green color of which corresponds to the color of the element found in the hottest parts of the sun’s corona during a solar eruption.
With the series Funghi, Allouche refocused on the living realm, working with species of spores that predate man. Allouche collected samples of the spores from several museums’ storage facilities, cultivated each one to observe their morphologies, as they spread and grew in widening circles. At a certain point in their development, he photographed them and printed them as lithographs. The act of blowing the spores into the petri dish with a glass pipette is finally echoed in the process of blowing the colored crown glass the artist makes to overlay each image. The circular sheets vary in color, opacity, and surface depth, at times obscuring and elsewhere highlighting the images of the spores.
Dove Allouche, born in Paris in 1972, attended École Nationale d’Art de Cergy and has received international honors including a recent collaboration with the CRCC (the Centre for Research on Collection Conservation) and CIRVA (the International Glass Research Centre, Marseilles, where he carried out the Funghi project), Villa Médicis in Rome (2011-2012) and grants from Villa Médicis-Hors les Murs (to work in Venezuela, 2006) and Programme à la carte (Norway, A.F.A.A, 2002). His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at venues including Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, (Paris, 2016), Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2013), and Nomas Foundation (Rome, 2012), and has been included in many group exhibitions including The Sun Placed in the Abyss (Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, 2016-2017), Double Take (Drawing Room, London, 2016), Sublime, les tremblements du monde (Centre Pompidou Metz, 2016), Réinventons le monde (Sala Relalde, Bilbao, 2013), Les détours de l’imaginaire (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012), La commande contemporaine de la Chalcographie du Louvre (Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2012), and Estudio Abierto (Palacio de Correos, Buenos Aires, 2006).
A reception for the artist will be held Thursday 23 February from 6 to 8 pm. An artist’s statement is available upon request. For reproduction requests, interviews with the artist and general inquiries, please contact the gallery at 212-966-5154 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Reception for the artist : Thursday 23 February from 6 to 8 pm

mpefm USA art press release