Yves Zurstrassen: Variations in Red at Salagon

An Artistic Dialogue with Roman Architecture and Aurélie Nemours’ Stained Glass

Set within the Romanesque church of Salagon, in the heart of the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, the exhibition « Variations rouges » brings together the work of Belgian painter Yves Zurstrassen in a powerful dialogue with a place shaped by time, light, and spiritual resonance. On view until December 14, 2026, the exhibition is an encounter between painting, architecture, and stained glass, between two distinct abstract languages united by rhythm, color, and silence.

The church of Salagon is already marked by a radical intervention: the stained glass windows created in 1998 by French abstract artist Aurélie Nemours. Composed of a single, intense red, they transform the Romanesque space into a field of vibrating light. It is within this charged environment at Salagon that Yves Zurstrassen developed his response.

Yves Zurstrassen’s Immersion in a Sacred Geometry of Light

Before beginning his series of paintings, Yves Zurstrassen spent time in Salagon’s church, observing how light moves through stone and glass, how it shifts across the rhythm of arches, columns, and vaults. This prolonged immersion became the foundation of Variations Rouges. Rather than approaching the site conceptually, he allowed it to imprint itself physically and sensorially, letting its temporal depth and architecture guide his composition.

What emerged from this process was not a representation of the Salagon site, but a response structured around verticality and repetition. His canvases adopt extended forms and rhythmic sequences that seem to echo the rising movement of the architecture itself. Color becomes movement, and repetition becomes a way of inhabiting space.

A Singular Red at Salagon’s Church

In Variations Rouges, the chromatic decision is both simple and decisive: red becomes the only dominant tone of the series. Yet Yves Zurstrassen carefully avoids the specific “selenium red” of Aurélie Nemours’ stained glass. Instead, he constructs a parallel red: distinct, unstable, and deeply personal.

This red operates as a form of dialogue that refuses literal correspondence. This subtle shift is at the heart of the project: a tribute that keeps its distance, and a dialogue that only exists through difference. If Aurélie Nemours’ abstraction tends toward a rigorous geometric order, Zurstrassen’s work introduces a more tactile and rhythmic instability. Both, however, share a concern for structure and void at Salagon.

Painting as Rhythm, Process, and Inversion

At the heart of Yves Zurstrassen’s practice lies a method that combines gesture, collage, and controlled erasure. His process relies on the use of stencils made from cut paper, often derived from printed materials. These elements are placed on the canvas, covered with layers of paint, and then carefully removed. What remains are zones of reserve, negative spaces that reveal the true architecture of the painting.

This inversion is fundamental. In Variations Rouges, what appears to the viewer as surface is, in fact, structure in reverse: painting unfolds as a layered archaeology of appearance and disappearance. This method, which the artist has described as a form of working “in reverse,” produces a paradoxical temporality. The painting contains its own history of construction, yet reveals it only at the moment of completion. Rhythm emerges not only in the composition, but in the very logic of its making.

Yves Zurstrassen Between Gesture and Musicality

Yves Zurstrassen’s abstraction is deeply connected to movement. Broad brushstrokes, rapid gestures, and layered structures generate a visual field that behaves almost like music. The influence of jazz, long present in his work, can be felt in this sense of improvisation within constraint, repetition within variation.

The forms do not aim to signify. Instead, they operate as vectors of energy, creating a dynamic field where perception is continuously reactivated. The painting becomes less an object than an event: something that unfolds in time as much as in space.

A Conversation Across Centuries at Salagon

Placed within the Romanesque church, these works enter into a broader historical resonance. The architecture of Salagon, with its austere geometry and medieval origins, already carries a sense of rhythm and repetition. Traces of earlier frescoes, including ochre-red pigments still visible on the walls, add another layer of chromatic memory.

In this context, Yves Zurstrassen’s paintings appear as contemporary echoes of a much older visual language, one in which color, structure, and spirituality were inseparable. The red of his canvases does not resolve into symbolism; instead, it circulates between past and present, between stone, glass, and pigment.

Variations Rouges: A Resonant Space of Light and Form

In Variations rouges, Yves Zurstrassen proposes not an answer to Salagon, but a continuation of its questions. How does light inhabit space? How does color shape perception over time and how can abstraction engage with architecture without dominating it?

His response is neither monumental nor illustrative. It is rhythmic, restrained, and deeply attentive to place. In the end, what emerges in Variations Rouges is a shared condition: between painting and Salagon’s church architecture, between glass and canvas, between silence and vibration.

A space where red is not a single color, but a field of relations, constantly shifting, endlessly recomposed.

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Yves Zurstrassen’s Abstract Paintings