The city of Rueil-Malmaison, in partnership with Atelier Grognard and Natacha Dassault, is honoring the late photographer Olivier Dassault through a major exhibition titled "Inspirations: Abstract Expressions." This comprehensive showcase runs through November 16, 2025, at the Atelier Grognard venue, featuring approximately sixty analog photographs spanning more than four decades of the artist's work.
The exhibition marks a significant return to Rueil-Malmaison for Dassault's work. In November 2017, the same venue hosted "Grand Angle, from Figuration to Abstraction," which Dassault himself described as his largest exhibition, featuring over one hundred photographs. The current exhibition presents a new curatorial approach built around analog photographs created over more than 40 years, accompanied by an illustrated biography that traces his artistic journey across more than 50 years of photography.
Dassault's artistic philosophy centered on the transformative power of light and human connection. "Art seems to me today a means—if not the means—of reconsidering our world, of reflecting on its essence, of probing the deep truth that will have eluded us, and of doing so TOGETHER," Dassault wrote in Paris in 2020. His body of work is characterized as abundant, eclectic, and resolutely abstract, with his approach maintaining a constant and utterly improvised dialogue with light.
The exhibition also features works by several contemporary artists chosen by Natacha Dassault to create dialogue with her late husband's abstract expressions. These artists include Griet Van Malderen, Fuad Kapidzic, Kouka, Hom Nguyen, JonOne, Rancinan, and Isabelle Girollet. This collaborative approach reflects Dassault's own preference for artistic conversations, which he frequently showcased at NAG (Not a Gallery), the art space he created with his wife in 2016.
Beyond photography, Dassault was a accomplished musician with family connections to renowned French composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974). Early in his career, he composed original film scores and later created more than one hundred corporate and institutional anthems for companies and major events. Excerpts from his musical compositions will be featured as part of the exhibition experience.
The exhibition serves as a platform to introduce the Olivier Dassault Endowment Fund, established by his widow Natacha Dassault. The fund is dedicated to ensuring the conservation, distribution, and promotion of Olivier Dassault's photographic work and the artistic movement associated with it. As Natacha Dassault reflects, "A glint of light tracing the curves of a subject—this was the visual poetry Olivier loved to capture. From this ray was born a geometry that shifted with inspiration and gesture. For him, the essential thing was the encounter with light. The man who laughed with his eyes loved to sculpt light. I like to believe that his light remains."
Dassault's photographic journey began in adolescence when photography revealed itself as his true calling. Remaining faithful to his Minolta XD7 camera, he devoted a significant portion of his life to capturing moments on analog film. His development as an artist progressed from amateur competitions to worldwide travels, with every experience serving as training for his eye, technique refinement, and conceptual approach development.
Over more than 40 years, Dassault's work evolved through instantaneous abstractions and improvised compositions using multiple exposures and in-camera superimpositions. He gradually freed himself from realistic constraints, exploring color and form as primary sources of creation. As an avid traveler, he absorbed the ineffable energy of places and everyday objects, creating unique and captivating visual compositions exclusively on film.
Dassault's unique perspective was shaped by his background as both a pilot and engineer, leading him to perceive and compose images between verticality and horizontality, giving his work its distinctive character. "He photographed everywhere, wherever he found himself. Through serendipities reimagined, he forged connection, a freedom of language composing and redrawing with an infinite state of awareness," the exhibition notes explain. His image-making process and format selection depended entirely on the emotion each subject aroused, designed to deliver maximum light and depth.
The photographer's work has achieved international recognition, with exhibitions spanning from Paris to New York, Madrid to Marrakech, and London to Brussels. His photographs appear in catalogs of numerous prestigious institutions, including the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, and the Palm Springs Art Museum in California. In 2023, his work was formally acquired by the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, cementing his place in contemporary art history.
Despite his roles as a Member of Parliament in the National Assembly and senior positions within the Dassault Group, it is Dassault's artistic career that truly distinguished him. His approach remained a quest driven by obsessive reflections toward creating the ultimate, unprecedented image. "Painting with light remains my credo," he often said, and his iconic statements reveal his mischievous spirit, sensitivity, and gestural virtuosity.
The exhibition emphasizes how each of Dassault's works bears witness to a fragment of life where light attunes itself to matter, inviting viewers to appreciate the world's beauty and preserve it. As he believed, "The fleeting image is fixed in motionless eternity." Chantal Dusserre-Bresson serves as the exhibition's curator, overseeing this comprehensive tribute that continues through November 2025 at the Atelier Grognard, located at 6, avenue du Château de Malmaison in Rueil-Malmaison.
