Yves Bélorgey scoured the world in search of “urban
suburb modernist buildings” as the subjects for his collection of large-scale paintings.
His work aims to reproduce both the ruins of modernism - an age of
architectural utopia for social housing - and the value of pictorial traditions.
Bélorgey’s tableaus have a set format (240 x 240 cm) and their titles document
the building’s location and the name of its architect, a social, political or
architectural failure, as well as the collapse of artistic modernism and painting.
With the renovation of urban social housing from the 1970s, Bélorgey too began
a period of “reparation” by fabricating building images. In doing so, he was to
champion a form of painting that makes proud use of traditional means, giving
it an anthropological dimension that is directly in touch with the reality of
our surroundings, with the present, and with the history of art.
