Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery is delighted to present Silent Voices, an exhibition exploring the enduring resonance of still life through the works of Pierre Boncompain, Ziad Dalloul, and Denis Laget. Co-organized with Alliance Française de Singapour, this exhibition is presented as part of vOilah! France Singapore Festival, organized by the Embassy of France in Singapore.
Once a genre of quiet observation, still life has evolved over centuries—from depictions of material abundance to profound explorations of form, emotion, and conceptual ideas. Silent Voices brings together three artists who transform everyday objects into vessels of memory, emotion, and metaphysical reflection. Through distinct visual languages, they engage in a contemporary dialogue with a centuries-old tradition, explores the quiet power of still life—where the genre becomes a language of reflection, tracing the tension between permanence and impermanence, beauty and decay, presence and absence.
Pierre Boncompain: The Fullness of Silence
For Boncompain, painting is the creation of silence, a sensory hymn to presence. His work embodies what he termed "le silence plastique" (plastic silence)—a state where objects transcend symbolism to exist purely as visual poetry.
His luminous compositions, often depicting Provençal fruits, draped fabrics, and sunlit interiors, echoes the light-obsessed tradition of Provençal painters like Cézanne.
Ziad Dalloul: The Presence of Absence
Ziad Dalloul reframes still life through the lens of nature silencieuse (“silent nature”) a term rooted in Arabic that resists the finality of nature morte(“dead nature”).
Born in Syria and based in France, Dalloul’s work is shaped by a dual heritage. His paintings, featuring chairs, beds, windows, and curtains, summon the absent human form, transforming domestic space into a metaphysical landscape.
Denis Laget: The Materiality of Silence
Laget draws from the vanitas tradition, but replaces moral allegory with material confrontation. The subjects in Denis Laget’s paintings appear to teeter on the edge of erasure.
In his densely layered canvases, colors accumulate to construct form, rendering subject and background inseparable to the point of abstraction, challenging the viewer to capture whatever is left in the magma of oil paint.
