Julian Charrière & Jannis Kounellis: Geneva

Olivier Varenne Art Moderne & Contemporain is pleased to bring together Julian Charrière and Jannis Kounellis in a cross-generational dialogue shaped by a shared commitment to material thinking. 

The exhibition follows the recent opening of Charrière's major solo exhibition Hard Core at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Tasmania, which likewise explores geology, deep time and the material forces that shape our planet. Across their practices, both artists turn to elemental substances — coal, fire, metal, oil — not simply as materials, but as carriers of history, energy and symbolic charge. In Kounellis’ work, raw matter — burning gas, steel, coal — confronts the viewer with the physical and political force of industrial modernity.

Charrière carries this legacy into the present, tracing how these same materials register planetary time, ecological transformation and the enduring logic of extraction. Here, material becomes both witness and agent: a repository of deep time, and a site of combustion, transformation and consequence. Where Kounellis insists on presence and confrontation, Charrière refracts these concerns through scientific processes and image-making, exposing the ways industrial histories continue to shape contemporary systems of perception. Fire and coal become conceptual hinges between energy and exhaustion, visibility and opacity, past and future.

The exhibition brings together a group of works by Julian Charrière that explore these tensions through distinct yet interconnected material strategies. In Buried Sunshines Burn (2023), petroleum oil is both subject and substance. Heliographic images made with natural tar collapse representation into extraction, transforming fossil fuel into a visible flow of deep time. In Coalface (2024), a polished slab of anthracite becomes a dark, unstable mirror. Animated by the indirect presence of flame, the work shifts coal from raw geological mass into a surface of reflection, implicating the viewer within the material histories it holds. In Sun Sets in Stone (2024), analogue double exposure brings a contemporary forest into contact with its Carboniferous fossil trace. Vast temporal scales converge, while coal-based pigments materially embed the image within the very cycles it evokes.

Seen alongside Kounellis, these works extend the Arte Povera engagement with elemental matter into a distinctly planetary register. If Kounellis stages coal and fire as immediate, charged presences, Charrière expands their reach across geological and ecological time — revealing fossil matter not merely as the residue of industrialisation, but as the afterimage of ancient life and a condition of the present.

At the heart of the exhibition is a simple but profound proposition: matter remembers. Coal carries vanished forests; oil holds the residue of ancient life; fire transforms what it touches. Across generations, Kounellis and Charrière ask us to look again at these substances — not as inert materials, but as active forces through which histories, environments and futures remain entangled.