The contemporary artist invites us on a sensory and poetic journey with Le jardin céleste, an exhibition on view from April 2 to May 1, 2025, at the Galerie Joseph, 47 rue des Tournelles, Paris.
Inhabited nature
For Katrin Zak, nature is not scenery: it breathes, pulsates and rises. With Le jardin céleste, the artist born in Moscow in 2002 imagines a silent choreography between visible worlds and those we can barely guess at. Flowers, lines, circulating energies: all dialogue in a gentle tension between exterior and interior.
His work doesn't impose itself. It waits to be approached. Zak doesn't just paint floral motifs; she links them to flows, almost physical vibrations. The whole acts like a chromatic bath in which the eye glides, suspended.
At the center of the exhibition, the series Charme Fragile du Printemps is part installation, part drawing, part ritual. Porcelain circles, linked by invisible threads, house hand-painted flowers. The structure evokes an organic cartography, as if observing the ramifications of a body or the roots of a spirit.
Each fragment has its own voice. Nothing is set in stone; everything seems to have a breath of life running through it. The colored lines recall energy networks - meridians, vibrations, memories. One could almost believe that these forms breathe us as much as we look at them.
Far from a decorative effect, this composition speaks of what connects us. The tension between the one and the many. Of what stands, discreetly, between the individual and the universal.
Zak's color is never gratuitous. It composes his paintings like prayers. In his chromatic choices, we find a filiation with the École de Paris - that generation of artists from Russia, from the Montparnasse of yesteryear, who painted life in fiery reds and deep blues.
But here, reference becomes living matter. Colors tell more than they illustrate. Yellow translates momentum. A pink, a memory. A green, a tension. This is a painting of refined instincts, of polished intuition, where every nuance carries an invisible narrative.
She says: "Color is a language capable of speaking the invisible. And when you look at her paintings, you understand what this really means: translating the elusive. To put into image what usually has no form.
"FIRST STILL LIFE WITH YELLOW VASE", 2023
A career already lived
Trained at the Moscow Fine Arts School, Katrin Zak begins exhibiting in 2019. At first, she explores the codes of pop culture and consumer language, which she hijacks with a certain irony. Brands, symbols, recognizable but troubled forms: her painting already speaks of identity, transformation and representation.
Today, her research is taking shape. She questions what it means to be in the world through silent, deeply vibrant installations. Her work is inspired by the notion of the "noosphere", the field of consciousness evoked by certain thinkers, where human ideas and emotions influence the environment.
Zak doesn't seek to illustrate this concept; she makes it tangible. In each work, a form of balance is established, precarious but fair. As if the artist were trying, in her own way, to repair something.
Her canvases convey a softness without mawkishness. A fluid tension between grace and precision. Even in his most abstract works, we sense a desire to transmit, to give, to open up. It's never cold, never distant. Rather, it's an outstretched hand, a presence.
Le jardin céleste doesn't claim to change everything, but it is a discreet reminder that looking differently transforms the way we inhabit living things.
Presented at Galerie Joseph, 47 rue des Tournelles, a sober, luminous venue, this exhibition is like a breath of fresh air. The aim is not to understand, but to experience. Zak doesn't try to convince. She leaves room. And everyone, in this suspended space, is free to explore their own inner landscapes.
You come away from this garden with the intuition that, sometimes, art is not about dazzling, but about reconciling. Between a brushstroke and a fleeting thought. Between painted porcelain and a fragment of the self.
"THIRD STILL LIFE WITH YELLOW VASE", 2023
