Abel Tournissoux

Abel Tournissoux, Paris, Lord Byron Editions, 2025

First edition
Print run of 220 copies
Hardcover, 23 x 28 cm, 192 pages
Bilingual edition: French, English
Translations by John Barrett
ISBN: 978-2-488446-00-6

Abel Tournissoux is the first monograph on the Franco-Belgian painter Abel Tournissoux.
Produced in co-edition with the gallery Au Cube, founded by David Biard, the volume features a preface by collector Hubert Neumann, as well as essays by Amélie Adamo and the painter Axel Pahlavi.

“Abel sidesteps the trap of reproduction and image-making to achieve painting. By multiplying gestures and diverse forms of writing, Abel at times compresses time, at others stretches it. It is within this temporal framework of painting that the image truly takes shape, that it comes alive. The pulse of painting—one never quite knows by what magic it begins to beat, or fails to. Yet the miracle of this presence, this vitality, seems always to occur in an in-between space. On a delicate threshold. Between strategy and truth, between reality and fiction, between fragment and wholeness.” (Excerpt from the text by Amélie Adamo)

Born in 1994 in Mâcon (France), Abel Tournissoux is a figurative painter who lives and works in Brussels. He trained at the École nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges (ENSA Bourges) and later at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels (ARBA-ESA Brussels), where he worked in the studio of Stephan Balleux. He is currently represented in France by the gallery Au Cube.

Amélie Adamo is an author, art critic, and exhibition curator. Her doctoral thesis in Contemporary Art History led to the publication of A History of Painting in the 1980s in France by Klincksieck Editions in 2010. In 2011, she published Metamorphoses of the Sacred: on Vladimir Velickovic with Galilée Editions. She is a regular contributor to many exhibition catalogues and specialist journals such as Le Journal des Arts, Verso Arts et Lettres, Art Absolument, Artension, and the magazine L’Œil, where she is a permanent collaborator. Deeply committed to supporting emerging artists while also reflecting on the work of renowned figures, she curates exhibitions in both galleries and museum institutions, focusing primarily on figurative painting and exploring themes such as memory and transmission, cultural fusion, and hybridity. Alongside her critical work, she has also taught Contemporary Art History at university level and in art schools.

Born in 1931 in Chicago, Hubert Neumann is a prominent American art collector and patron, overseeing the family collection “The Neumann Family Collection” initiated by his father, Morton G. Neumann.

Axel Pahlavi was born in 1975 in Tehran, Iran. He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He received the Pierre Bonnard Prize in 2007, the First Prize of the Antoine Marin Award in 2009, and the painting fellowship awarded by the Roux and Tronchet Foundations at the Institut de France that same year. Since 2002, he has regularly exhibited in France, Germany, the United States, and Greece; notably in the major exhibition “Immortelle” held at MO.CO in Montpellier in 2023, curated by Numa Hambursin and Amélie Adamo, which brought together the majority of the French figurative scene. In September 2024, Thomas Levy-Lasne invited him to participate in “The Day of the Painters” at the Musée d’Orsay. His works are included in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Maeght Foundation, the Salomon Foundation, the Frissiras Museum in Athens, and the Jerry Speyer Collection in New York.