The intimacy of time

From November 22, 2025 to April 12, 2026, the contemporary art center Les Tanneries presents L’intimité des tempsa solo exhibition by Claire Trotignon as part of Season 8ter of the cycle Nos Maisons Apparentées. Through drawings, collages and installations, the artist composes suspended landscapes between ruin and construction, where the memory of forms dialogues with the architectural space of Les Tanneries.

For the past fifteen years, Claire Trotignon has been developing a precise and poetic body of work based on notions of structure, fragment and trace. Using engraved images taken from architectural manuals or old encyclopedias, she assembles meticulous compositions in which architectural elements are recomposed in uncertain topographies, without stable scale or defined horizon. These collages, often enhanced with washes, gouache strokes or flat tints, evoke cartography, archaeology or the memory of territories.

His installations extend this research into real space: structures of wood, steel or plaster create a precarious balance between construction and collapse, memory and disappearance.

“I take great pleasure in deconstructing elements of reality to reactivate them in other forms, as if each fragment were simultaneously projecting us into the wake of its past and proposing a future – I see it as a prismatic phenomenon”, explains Claire Trotignon. The artist, who spent a long time exploring the nooks and crannies of an Italian-style theater when she was younger, notes that her drawings “have certainly inherited this suspended temporality, this in-between act in which [she] likes to summon up a certain poetics of space”.

Presented simultaneously with Shooting Star by Boris Chouvellon in the Grande Halle, L’intimité des tempsis part of the cycle Nos Maisons Apparentéescycle, which explores correspondences between works and spaces. Both artists share an interest in matter, memory and places of transition, but each deploys a singular vision: where Boris Chouvellon conjures up the poetry of industrial ruins, Claire Trotignon reveals the delicacy of interior constructions, the mental and sensitive architectures of memory.

Since their opening in 2016, Les Tanneries have been home to a demanding and open program, where generations, disciplines and scales of intervention engage in dialogue. Designated as a contemporary art center of national interest, the venue’s Grande Halle, Galerie Haute and park host exhibitions that make Amilly a territory of resonance and long-term artistic experimentation.