Duo exhibition: Sommes-nous
Marion Bataillard & Nazanin Pouyandeh

This exhibition was born from a desire: the desire to create a dialogue between deeply embodied pictorial practices, where the human figure is never a mere motif, but a site of trial, memory, and connection.

For Marion Bataillard and Nazanin Pouyandeh, painting is a way of engaging with the world, of questioning its narratives and opening up new possibilities. Figurative painting is currently undergoing a powerful resurgence, driven by many artists who are reinvesting in narrative, the body, and memory with renewed intensity. The exhibition

Sommes-nous, whose title is borrowed from a song by Alain Bashung, brings together two artists, two women, two painters: Marion Bataillard and Nazanin Pouyandeh. Though their worlds and pictorial languages differ profoundly, a shared dynamic unites them: the idea of painting as a space of relation. A relation between bodies, between identities, between imaginations—but also between the viewer’s gaze and the emotional weight of the artworks.

Both artists share a deep commitment to representing the inhabited body, traversed by multiple, often contradictory or fragmented narratives. In their work, painting becomes a space of density where the intimate meets the political, where classical references engage with contemporary urgencies. What brings them together, beyond their generation and their grounding in a demanding and virtuosic painting practice, is a shared concern with connection: connection between people, between stories, between cultures—but also between pictorial tradition and contemporary language.

Curated by
Yvan Poulain, Director, and Patrick Roussel, Deputy Director of L’Artothèque, Contemporary Art Spaces of Caen.