The Eric and Valérie Galéa gallery was founded in Vaucluse in 2005 by two photography and contemporary art enthusiasts.
Since 2018, it is in the heart of the Luberon that the gallery presents various exhibitions of international artists in an authentic 17th century setting.
Contemporary Art is a global market where artists from all countries have a body of work and an identity to present and values to defend.
Through their exhibitions and contemporary art fairs in which they regularly participate, the two gallery owners have taken up the challenge of presenting emerging artists from international countries, where often galleries are only wisely presenting local artists.
In meetings with its international artists, whose talent is quickly recognized by museums and renowned collectors, they have chosen to defend a universal pictorial language.
Their participation in the FNB Art Fair in Johannesburg since 2012, first as part of the France/South Africa Cross Seasons with the support of the French Institute, allowed them to meet South African photographers who are now gallery permanent artists: Christo Doherty, professor at the University of Witts in Johannesburg, André S. Clements, Huw Morris, Ben Skinner.
At the 2013 Encounters of Arles, where the gallery exhibited for the first time as part of the France/South Africa Cross Seasons with the support of the French Institute, photographers Jean-Christophe Ballot and Christo Doherty, they discovered the Robin Hammond’s work on Zimbabwe will mark their definitive commitment to the world of image.
Photography has joined the collections in the same way as painting. The artist’s gaze is like the brush on the canvas, fixing a snapshot, delivering a sublime moment in the beauty of a landscape or body or the atrocity of a war photoreport narrative.
Our own vision of the work and the connection between our senses and the message left by the artist allows us to appropriate the image, we make the reading, deciphering, analysis, comparison, then we integrate it, print it in our subconscious, she’s part of us.
Photography touches the soul, where painting touches only the mind. In our world where image takes precedence over relational, this medium has a direct language that does not require academic knowledge to appreciate the moment; a place, a face, the meeting took place, sometimes unforgettable.
It is this unexpected, unhoped for encounter that changes a being, a seen photography that changes a destiny. You no longer look in the same way, sometimes free of received ideas, educational straitjacket, just free to think.
It is these meetings that the gallery offers you, making you share their emotions. The next exhibition invites you to visit the great site of the Sainte-Victoire mountain over the four seasons, nature revealed.
