EXHIBITION
Charles Belle
“Inclination”
30 June > 30 August 2026
Abbaye de Baume-les-Dames (Doubs, France)
In Charles Belle’s work, there is a quiet gravity, an attentiveness to the world rather than a desire to grasp it. Inclination brings together this sensitive disposition, suggesting at once a movement of the body, a direction of the gaze, a way of thinking.
The works gathered at the Abbaye de Baume-les-Dames unfold within a space that seems attuned to them. Far from serving merely as a historic setting, the abbey resonates with their inner temporality. Ancient stone walls and vaulted spaces receive landscapes and flowers devoid of human presence, yet filled with a sensory memory: the light of a season, the dampness beneath wild grasses, the fleeting nature of a bloom. Everything here is at once precise and mysterious, immediate and timeless. The landscapes, vast and meditative, create breathing spaces, territories in which the gaze may wander. The flowers, emerging from shadow, appear both sovereign and fragile, intensely present. Their monumentality does not protect them from vulnerability.
The exhibition proposes a contemplative journey toward what precedes history itself. A world preserved from agitation and narrative. Charles Belle’s large landscapes are never topographical. They open intervals of silence in which vision ceases to be an act of conquest and becomes instead a form of receptivity. One might speak of a painting of climate in the deepest sense of the word — not the description of a place, but the sensation of a temperature, a density, a fragrance.
Founded in the 8th century and rebuilt in the 11th century around a chapter of noble canonesses, the abbey remained for centuries a female community devoted to prayer and work. Despite the successive transformations of the building, the site still preserves the memory of a relationship to time shaped by withdrawal and contemplation. Within this former abbey, Charles Belle’s works invite slowness and a profound attentiveness to the living world.
Special screening of the film “Beyond Silences”
followed by a conversation with Charles Belle and François Royet
Tuesday, 30 June 2026
8:00 PM
Cinéma STELLA
Baume-les-Dames