From the 22nd october to the 31st December 2005, the Grand Café contemporary art centre hosts a solo show by Jens Wolf, his first in France and his first in a public institution. Like all abstract painters of his generation, Jens Wolf (born in 1967) is faced with the question of the meaning that form – in this case geometric form – has for us today. Though he deals with the question of surface and ground, of colour, of the limits of painting, as did the 1950s american abstract painters to whom he occasionally directly refers (Frank Stella, Barnett Newman), he does not follow them in looking to neutralize the picture plane. Quite the opposite: he (re)introduces imperfections (the roughness and the patterns of the wooden support, breaks) which amplify the painting’s materiality and our perceptual sensations. The forms that Jens Wolf paints, off-centre or cut short by the broken edges of the support, seem spatially and temporally unstable. This opens up an imaginative space for the viewer. Whether we take them to be sketches or to be rebuses, these paintings propose a sensorial experience being played out in the “here-and-now”. The exhibition at the Grand Café brings together a group of older and recent works, and unveils a wall-painting created for the event. Sophie Legrandjacques Traduction Richard Gray