The exhibition "A MINIMA" by Sidival Fila and Jean Degottex at Galerie Mennour, Paris

The Fondazione Filantropica Sidival Fila is pleased to present "A minima", an exhibition hosted by Galerie Mennour in Paris that brings into dialogue the works of Sidival Fila and Jean Degottex (1918–1988). Two artists who, despite belonging to different generations and contexts, share a radical pursuit grounded in the reduction of the mark, visual meditation, and an understanding of essentiality as a space of balance and intensity.

In the early 1980s, Jean Degottex entered one of the most extreme and simplified phases of his career. Following the gestural intensity of previous decades, his painting entered a period of deep meditation: gesture disappears, the mark withdraws, and the surface becomes the support for minimal traces, imprints, and scratches. The artist’s interest in Eastern philosophy, Zen emptiness, and breath (qi) shaped a thinking in which painting progressively dissolves. The canvas becomes a field of energies, where gesture occurs only at its point of equilibrium: enough to generate a vibration, but not enough to form a recognizable motif. The mark melts into a rhythm suspended between tension and erasure, revealing an inner movement that transforms painting into a perceptive and mental experience.

Sidival Fila’s work seems to continue this trajectory. For several decades, his practice, deeply permeated by spirituality, has focused on the vibrations of materials and their ability to hold and reveal energy. Like Degottex, Sidival Fila works through a radical reduction of means, choosing simple and time-worn materials: antique fabrics, raw canvases, ordinary sheets, and liturgical garment linings. On these surfaces, he intervenes with meticulous stitching, incision, and layering, generating silent tensions and minimal shifts. Sidival Fila does not paint: he sculpts the surface. Thread, suturing, and tension become vectors of retained, non-expressive energy, manifesting in vibrating surfaces marked by folds and points of contact between shadow and light.

The proximity between Sidival Fila and Jean Degottex is founded on a shared experience of meditation understood as a visual event. Both artists aspire to a form of minimal art in which emptiness is not absence but active space. Degottex stated that emptiness is “the place where something can happen”; Sidival Fila, from his studio in the Franciscan convent on the Palatine Hill overlooking the Colosseum, finds this same dynamic of active emptiness. Fabric is not a neutral support but memory, tension, and a vibrating surface—a place of listening and equilibrium.

"A minima" thus presents a silent dialogue between two practices that conceive the minimal gesture as a threshold of intensity, where reduction and attention coincide, and the artwork becomes a space of resonance.

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We invite you to attend the opening and visit the exhibition, which will be open until February 21st, 2026, from Tuesday to Saturday, 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM. Free admission.

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OPENING

Thursday January 15th, 2026, from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

Galerie Mennour

47 rue Saint-André-des-Arts - 75006 Paris, France

Free Admission

© Fondazione Filantropica Sidival Fila, Credits: Francesco Gili / Archives Jean Degottex Photo Keiichi Tahara