18.10.25 – 16.11.25

Born in Buenos Aires in 1940 and trained at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, Roberto Platé emerged in the 1960s at the Instituto Di Tella, a veritable laboratory for the Argentine avant-garde. In 1968, his installation Los Baños, censored by the military dictatorship, led him to leave Argentina. After arriving in Paris with the collective TSE – Théâtre Sans Explication, which he co-founded with Alfredo Arias, he developed a body of work at the crossroads of painting, installation and stage design.

In the intimacy of his studio, far from the theater and opera stages where he has designed over a hundred sets for the world’s greatest stages, Platé weaves a singular pictorial oeuvre, whose strength lies in a subtle interplay between figuration and abstraction.

The exhibition brings together a group of canvases from 1990 to 2000, a pivotal period when the artist, who had long since settled in Paris, asserted his pictorial freedom. These works bear the hallmark of a constant dialogue with the scenography: bold framing, silhouettes cut out as if on a stage, reflections and plays on perspective that recall his genius for trompe-l’oeil. The painter invites us to enter his world as if we were entering a set, where every color becomes an actor, every gesture a set in motion.

Columns, a recurring motif, structure the space of his studio like the pillars of a spiritual architecture. They refer to a verticality that is both pictorial and interior, a discreet echo of his Sufi practice, where color has a symbolic and vibratory dimension. But above all, it’s the painting that takes precedence: luminous flat tints, intense contrasts, chromatic rhythms. Platé is a conscious colorist who works with matter with an energy that gives his canvases an astonishing vitality.

The silhouettes – whether colored shadows or veiled self-portraits – give these paintings an immediate presence. They are passing figures, apparitions, fragments of everyday scenes. In certain series, the praise of the body and sensuality emerges, between modesty and intensity. The viewer becomes witness to a suspended moment.

A painter of the studio and of materials, Platé reveals the very act of creation: familiar objects, tools and his own body at work are transformed into fragments of a silent narrative. The textures are rich, the colors deep, the composition conceived as a visual score, between rigor and freedom.