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Galleria Continua / Les Moulins presents La Chair aux Gens, a solo exhibition by French artist Stéphanie Mansy, on view from June 1 – August 24, 2025. Situated in the Art & Futur space of the art gallery, the show unfolds within the unique environment of the Moulin de Boissy, a former paper mill on the banks of the Grand Morin River in France. This historic site, where the flow of water has shaped human activity for centuries, provides a fertile context for Mansy's exploration of the entanglements between nature, industry and memory.
The Art & Futur programme at Les Moulins seeks to open spaces of dialogue between local communities and international networks, inviting audiences to collectively envision the present and future. Mansy's intervention resonates with this ethos, weaving together documentary research and artistic practice to reflect on layered histories and ecological interdependencies.
At the heart of Mansy's approach lies paper: not simply as a surface, but as a living material with a long and complex history. Her fascination with its properties, vulnerabilities and transformations led her to investigate remnants of the Moulin's industrial past. With the support of the Association des Compagnons Papetiers de Croëvecœur et du Marais, the art exhibition integrates historical artefacts such as watermark rollers, mechanical components and archival photographs. These objects, once tools of production, now stand as silent witnesses to a vanished era of craftsmanship and industry.
In La Chair aux Gens, Mansy stages these archival materials in direct dialogue with her own works. Where the metal cylinders evoke solidity and permanence. On a single sheet, she combines close textures with sweeping vistas, often punctuated by negative space. The act of repetition in her mark-making, as noted by art historian Elisabeth Piot, "becomes almost mechanical, allowing a certain detachment or absence of self to emerge", yet also opens a space for flashes of awareness, where line transforms into image.
The exhibition highlights Mansy's process of field observation and studio reinterpretation. Immersed in the tonal shifts and vitality of the Grand Morin, she translates her impressions through graphite, pigments, collages and layered papers. Some works integrate fragments of technical documents or book pages, while others rely on timeworn, mould-stained surfaces. This material experimentation creates what Mansy herself describes as a "stratigraphy"—a layered record that mirrors the site's balance of human and natural forces across centuries.
La Chair aux Gens ultimately unfolds as both an artistic gesture and a documentary. It does not merely depict a landscape, but reveals the deep interplay between site, memory and matter. In juxtaposing archival traces with her fragile yet insistent drawings, Mansy invites viewers to sense the continuity of life and work that has long animated the Moulin de Boissy.
The multidisciplinary artist also teaches at the Beauvais School of Art and the Faculty of Arts in Amiens and is represented by Galerie F in Senlis, France. She has been recognised with the Carré sur Seine Prize (2018) and a nomination for the Drawing Now Art Fair Prize (2024). Her works, spanning drawing, engraving and painting, are held in public collections such as FRAC Picardie and the Pilar and Joan Miró Foundation, alongside numerous private collections.
Through La Chair aux Gens, Mansy continues her longstanding inquiry into how art can capture suspended moments, where natural rhythms, industrial memory and human presence converge into new ways of seeing.
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