Hervé Di Rosa, co-founder of the Free Figuration movement, occupies all three floors of the La Malmaison art center: forty years of painting, including nineteen collaborations with artisans from around the world, until November 8.

Lacquer, mother-of-pearl, and eggshell on wood. This is a Di Rosa work from 1997, and it's called Warning Your Children Against the Dangers of Art. The painter of the Figuration Libre movement, the one behind L'Attaque de la rue du Malheur and the International Villains of the early 1980s, co-founded the movement in 1981 with Robert Combas, Rémi Blanchard, and François Boisrond, before spending the following decades having his images produced elsewhere, by other hands and using other techniques. The ground floor of the La Malmaison art center retains the effervescence of those years, with its hybrid figures, abundant narrative, and bold colors, drawing on comics and popular imagery.

On the first floor begins Around the World: nineteen stages, from Seville to Vietnam via Ghana, Mexico, Israel, Miami, and Paris, each time undertaken with local artisans, using their techniques and materials. Farewell to the Doll, painted in Mexico in 2003 and 2004, is one of its key pieces, alongside Thai Food and The Great Blue, a three-meter canvas where the Mediterranean teems with creatures. Vietnamese lacquer, polyurethane, painted wood: the artist calls these pieces site-specific works, and it is the material that tells the story of the journey as much as the motif.

The top floor brings together recent canvases, Stranded Idols in 2024, Submerged Idols in 2025, and the same figure runs through them all: large eyes, bold colors, dark humor. In the meantime, Di Rosa founded the International Museum of Modest Arts in Sète in 2000, and joined the Academy of Fine Arts in 2022. The art center, reopened in January 2025 after renovations by the Wilmotte agency, has tripled its surface area, from 207 to 600 square meters: a necessary expansion to cover forty years. A catalog by Philippe Dagen accompanies the exhibition. Only the material changes, Di Rosa said of this painting entrusted to other hands. It changes everything. On view until November 8th only.