Luxembourg Art Week
For Luxembourg Art Week, Duran Contemporain brings together Paul Béliveau and Aline Setton in a dialogue around construction, fragmentation, perspective and narrative. Both artists build their compositions through a rigorous geometry in which straight lines define planes, establish boundaries and organize pictorial space. Within this apparent order, however, each constructs an image from fragments that originate elsewhere.
In Béliveau’s work, books become both objects and architectural elements, but they also carry an intrinsic relationship to storytelling. Each book contains a narrative, yet in many of these paintings its author, title and contents remain inaccessible to us. These anonymous stories are stacked, balanced and juxtaposed to form new structures. A book ceases to function solely as a vessel for an individual text and becomes a fragment within another narrative, one created through its relationship to the books and spaces around it.
Setton constructs her images through a comparable process of displacement and assembly. Her compositions bring together environments drawn from different places and different moments: interiors and exteriors, cultivated gardens and natural landscapes, architectural structures and distant horizons, daylight and dusk. These fragments do not describe a single existing location or a continuous moment in time. They are assembled into imaginary spaces in which geography, architecture and temporality coexist according to a new pictorial logic.
This fragmentation creates a tension with verisimilitude, the appearance of being real or believable. Perspective, light and volume lend credibility to spaces that could not necessarily exist as depicted. Béliveau’s books retain their material specificity even as they form improbable constructions; Setton’s environments appear inhabitable despite being assembled from incompatible places and moments.
In both practices, the rigidity of the straight line provides structure for something much less fixed. Fragments of stories, objects, places and time are brought together to create a new narrative. Béliveau withholds the stories contained within his books and allows their juxtaposition to suggest another; Setton removes places from their original geography and time and recomposes them into environments that exist only within the painting. What initially appears to be an exercise in geometry and perspective therefore becomes an act of storytelling: a constructed reality made believable through verisimilitude, but made meaningful through the relationships between its fragments.
PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Duran Contemporain presents Paul Béliveau and Aline Setton at Luxembourg Art Week 2026
Montréal / Luxembourg, November 2026 — Duran Contemporain is pleased to present a two-person presentation of Paul Béliveau and Aline Setton at Luxembourg Art Week 2026. Bringing together two distinct painting practices, the presentation explores the construction of the image, fragmentation, perspective, and the ways in which elements drawn from different realities can be assembled to create new spaces and new narratives.
For Paul Béliveau, the book operates simultaneously as subject, object and narrative device. Stacked, juxtaposed or held in sometimes improbable states of equilibrium, his books become components of almost architectural constructions. Many remain anonymous: neither their titles, their authors nor the stories they contain are revealed to us. Each volume therefore carries the possibility of a narrative that remains inaccessible, while its relationship to the surrounding books generates a new narrative that is entirely visual.
Aline Setton similarly works through processes of assembly, but her fragments are drawn from places. Her paintings bring together architecture, interiors, cultivated gardens, natural landscapes and distant horizons originating from different locations and different times of day. Geographic and temporal continuity gives way to an imagined construction. Distinct environments meet within a single painting and become components of a place that appears possible without ever having truly existed.
Despite this fragmentation, the works of both artists possess a strong sense of verisimilitude, the appearance of being real or believable. Perspective, light, volume and the precision of the line lend coherence to their constructed spaces. For both Béliveau and Setton, the straight line becomes a structure through which the imaginary can be organized: it defines planes, orders fragments and allows the eye to accept as credible relationships that are, in fact, invented.
Duran Contemporain’s presentation therefore brings together two approaches to constructing an image and, through it, a narrative. Béliveau assembles objects that literally contain stories; Setton assembles spaces that carry the memory of distinct places and moments. In both practices, fragmentation does not interrupt the narrative. It becomes its point of departure.
Paul Béliveau + Aline Setton
Duran Contemporain
Luxembourg Art Week 2026
Booth D17
Luxembourg, Luxembourg
