When People Meet Places
Sometimes, you pick two artists out of a lineup because their work looks nothing alike—and yet, the longer you stare, the more you realize they’re part of the same secret club. That’s exactly how I felt about Alina Grasmann and Jerome Lagarrigue. On the surface, they couldn’t be more different: Alina’s meticulously rendered architectural spaces exude a quiet unease, while Jerome’s bold, raw portraits hit you with the full force of human emotion. But there’s something deeper connecting them, something that goes beyond visuals—a shared understanding of absence and presence, of silence and stories waiting to be told.
Where Alina’s work is about spaces and what they hide, Jerome’s is about people and what they reveal. His subjects confront you head-on, meeting your gaze with a mix of challenge and vulnerability. These are not passive figures. They’re living, breathing, enduring beings, and they dare you to see them for who they are.
So here’s the big question: What if the people in Jerome’s portraits wandered into the spaces Alina paints? Would they feel at home in those meticulously empty rooms, or would they disrupt the delicate balance of silence and memory? I imagine one of Jerome’s figures—strong and defiant—standing in the middle of Alina’s unnervingly tidy living room. Would they lean against the perfectly arranged bookshelves, or would they knock everything over just to see what happens? Would the spaces expand to accommodate their stories, or would they crumble under the weight of their presence?
On a deeper level, both Alina and Jerome are exploring the same fundamental question: What does it mean to exist in a space—physically, emotionally, historically? Alina’s spaces, devoid of people, become vessels for memory and projection. Jerome’s figures, stripped of elaborate settings, become embodiments of resilience and identity. Both invite us to engage with what’s not immediately visible—the lives lived, the stories untold, the gaps between what we see and what we feel.
Despite their visual differences, both artists are masters of tension. Alina’s tension lies in the eerie perfection of her spaces, the unsettling quiet that begs you to fill it. Jerome’s tension is raw and immediate, found in the intensity of his brushstrokes and the emotional depth of his subjects. Both leave you slightly off-balance, questioning what’s real and what’s imagined.
And maybe that’s the point. In their own ways, both Alina and Jerome remind us that art isn’t just about what you see. It’s about what you feel, what you remember, and what you bring to the experience. Their work asks you to lean in, to sit with the discomfort, to find beauty in the gaps and the cracks.