Exhibition | Priory Saint-Cosme
In the final residence of Pierre de Ronsard, the work of Charles Belle finds a singular resonance. Not as an illustration of the poet, nor as an erudite dialogue between painting and literature, but through a shared attention to what remains alive beneath the passage of time: the fragility of beings, their disappearance, and their secret persistence within the memory of the world.
Entitled The Footsteps of Silence, the exhibition brings together 25 works, including 10 previously unseen pieces, recently created by the artist around iconic fossil skulls from the history of humankind.
Toumaï, Homo habilis, Neanderthal, Australopithecus, so many faces emerging from an inconceivable past. Charles Belle approaches them neither as scientific objects nor as funerary symbols. He paints them as presences. As beings who endured cold, fear, hunger, desire, and light. Existences separated from us by millions of years, and yet mysteriously close. These skulls thus become portraits, not reconstructions, but encounters. In these paintings of profound silent intensity, the artist seeks what, from those vanished lives, continues to inhabit our own: an archaic, buried, shared part of ourselves. A memory without narrative.
These new works resonate alongside other bodies of work, older and more recent, that have long traversed Charles Belle’s practice. Among them are two monumental drawings created in the forest and left there for two years, exposed to the rhythm of wind, rain, light, and the changing seasons. Not as works abandoned to nature, but as a way of accepting that time itself also draws. A vast, primordial landscape will likewise open the exhibition, together with two “tributes” paid by the artist to several major figures in the history of painting, within a discreet yet fully acknowledged lineage. What connects these works is not a theme in the narrative sense of the term. It is a shared inner tension: a persistent questioning of our place within the living world, of what precedes and surpasses us, and of the way time passes through bodies, landscapes, and memories.
At the Prieuré Saint-Cosme, where Ronsard rests, this exhibition takes on a particular dimension. The Renaissance poet celebrated the fragile beauty of the world while fully aware of its inevitable disappearance. Charles Belle paints that same consciousness of time, yet stripped of all lyrical effect, in a dense, physical material permeated by silence. The Footsteps of Silence is an exacting exhibition in the depth of its questions, yet immediately accessible through the sensory power of the works. It invites each visitor to experience, before these paintings, something essential and very ancient: the fleeting sensation of belonging to a history far greater than oneself.
CHARLES BELLE
"Les pas du silence"
from June 20 to November 1, 2026
PRIEURE SAINT-COSME - Demeure de Ronsard
37520 La Riche, Tours (37)
