Collection: Traces & Returns

Since July 1st, four artists — Cécile Renoult, José Ignacio Mendizábal, Shazia Ahmad, and Pascale Jean — have been in residence at Galerie JANO, producing new work grounded in introspection, material investigation, and the layered histories each artist carries with them. Though their practices span drawing, painting, diorama, textile, and sculpture, the works presented here share a commitment to exploring how memory and place take form.

Cécile Renoult works delicately and insistently with drawing and textile structures. Her gestures trace the fragile architecture of the body and the subtle marks left by time, revealing the quiet boundaries between presence and disappearance.

José Ignacio Mendizábal builds his residency work from a recently uncovered archive of nearly 2,000 family photographs, transforming these images into vivid paintings and drawings. His work navigates the complexities of cultural heritage, migration, and the Mestizo figure, reflecting the ways personal and collective histories overlap.

Shazia Ahmad’s practice blends painting, printmaking, and miniature dioramas to explore home, displacement, and layered belonging. Her carefully constructed scenes merge symbolic motifs, domestic details, and cultural references into intimate spaces that hold both comfort and distance.

Pascale Jean works through saturated colour, playful figuration, and sculptural experimentation. Her works illuminate emotional environments and interpersonal dynamics, offering glimpses into domestic and psychological spaces that are humorous, tender, and charged.

Together, these four artists present an exhibition that considers memory not as a fixed record but as an evolving terrain — inherited, reconstructed, and continually remade.