In Venice, the Golden Tree Foundation will host the first exhibition in Italy dedicated to Patrick Saytour

The Golden Tree Foundation in Venice will host in the spaces of Palazzo Vendramin Grimani from April 18 to November 22, 2026 the exhibition Patrick Saytour. Le pli et le temps / The fold and the time, curated by Daniela Ferretti in collaboration with Ceysson & Bénétiè;re. The project is part of the Foundation’s research and exhibition path that, over the years, has developed an ongoing reflection on thread and fabric, coming today to investigate the fold as a metaphor for an ethic capable of accommodating complexity and imperfection. Also on this occasion, a central role is given to the dialogue between the works and the spaces of Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, where history and contemporaneity meet through original projects, the result of in-depth research.

Patrick Saytour (Nice, 1935 - Aubais, 2023) was a central figure of the Supports/Surfaces movement and one of the protagonists of French pictorial experimentation since the 1960s. The movement, which developed in the 1970s, brought together artists such as André-Pierre Arnal, Vincent Bioules, Louis Cane, Daniel Dezeuze, Noël Dolla, Toni Grand, Bernard Pagès and Claude Viallat, who were united by an intense theoretical debate and a shared commitment to unconventional exhibition practices, often experimented with in collective form.

This is the first exhibition in Italy dedicated to the French artist, which will present awide selection of the outcomes of Saytour’s research, characterized by folds, cuts, burns, tears, solarization and stitching: unstable surfaces that refuse a definitive form and construct an authentic existential lexicon. The palace’s ornate rooms, perspectives on the Grand Canal, stuccoes, floors, and historic architecture become the frame and counterpoint for fabrics that are folded, burned, or exposed to the action of the sun.

The fragility of the material used by the artist confronts the solidity of stone and historical memory, giving rise to a dialogue made of resonances and contrasts, vulnerability and durability, silence and layering of time. Each environment is configured as an experiential threshold, a space in which the work is called upon to be perceived even before it is observed. Numerous series in the exhibition trace the artist’s production, including Plié/Déplié, intended as true temporal archives: drapes that preserve the memory of gestures and transformations of matter. The fold emerges here as a metaphor for anethic of reception, capable of including complexity, imperfection and discontinuity. In contrast, the Repliés and Brulages highlight the vulnerability of fabric: the fold holds shadows, fire imprints scars, while time settles in thin, persistent layers.

In Still lifes, Saytour transforms everyday objects into structures suspended between balance and instability. In these works, the fold becomes a tool to interrogate the silent life of things, their resistance to time and their fragile permanence.

A particularly significant core of the exhibition consists of a careful selection of works on paper, which represent the most intimate core of the exhibition. It is on this medium that the artist concentrates and distills his energy: minimal vibrations, rapid etchings and light marks reveal the inexhaustible vitality of gesture. Far from being marginal, these works delineate a silent geography that allows the visitor access to the artist’s inner laboratory and to a quest devoid of definitive landfalls.

Within the itinerary, Saytour’s work enters into dialogue with the radical tension and silence of Piero Manzoni, an artist who entrusted zeroing and conceptual gesture with the very meaning of the work, to the point of questioning the figure of the author through the irony of his own actions. Achrome, Lines, Artist’s Breath and some works on paper constitute the necessary counterpoint to Saytour’s manipulations and metamorphoses of matter and surface. Both artists make visible a constant tension between resetting and rebirth, between gesture and idea, between the desire for a tabula rasa and the need to accommodate matter. Two visions united by a need for truth: the rejection of ornament and the urgency of a gesture that neither simulates nor represents. From this dialogue arises a space for reflection and suspension, a pause in which thought expands and the gaze is renewed.

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In Venice, the Golden Tree Foundation will host the first exhibition in Italy dedicated to Patrick Saytour

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