The article covers the retrospective exhibition of French artist duo Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille at the Carré d'art in Nîmes. Titled "Dissonances à géométries variables," the show traces their career from student works at the École nationale supérieure d'art de Dijon to recent paintings, featuring a critical, humorous, and materially rich approach to figurative painting. The duo draws from press images, internet sources, art history, and archives, disrupting reproductions with paint splatters and odd details, and the exhibition is organized thematically from "happiness" to "melancholy."
This retrospective matters because Tursic & Mille have persistently championed figurative painting since the 1990s, a time when the art world largely dismissed the medium as outdated. Their work offers a sharp, playful critique of image saturation and ideology, using painting to add depth and complexity to familiar visuals. The exhibition also highlights their unique process, including the display of paint palettes and a studio table as artworks, underscoring the materiality and daily labor of painting in a conceptually rigorous way.