Consider these boots first. Covered in white and black paint, planted on a floor just as spattered, they belong to Pierre Alechinsky, captured in Maussane in 1997. His face is nowhere to be seen, only what the gesture left on the leather: a map of a studio, in effect, more faithful than any portrait.

Jean Marie del Moral has photographed this kind of evidence for nearly 50 years. The son of Spanish Republican exiles, he began in photography at age 14, as an assistant in an aeronautics company’s photo department: studio work, artificial lighting, darkroom technique, the grammar of the craft before any notion of subject. At French newspaper L’Humanité, starting in 1973, he covered social affairs, then the Carnation Revolution, in Portugal, in 1974. The following year, settled in North America, he discovered at MoMA the Abstract Expressionists and the photographers who would always stay with him a little: Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Irving Penn, Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

Miquel Barceló, Paris, 2006 © Jean Marie del Moral

Pierre Soulages’s studio, Paris, 1997 © Jean Marie del Moral

Then came 1978, and Barcelona, where del Moral met Joan Miró for a story on Spanish intellectuals after Franco’s death. The encounter proved founding: ever since, he has never stopped photographing painters and sculptors at work, less for their finished pieces than for the moment just before, when nothing is yet fixed.

In Saumur, France the exhibition opens with seven large-format photographs of studio details, followed by a series of 46 portraits, then rooms devoted to emblematic studios. Pierre Soulages appears here, standing against a white wall in Sète in 1993, two brushes and a squeegee laid before him like surgical instruments. César appears too, in the marble of Pietrasanta, one hand resting on the shoulder of an antique statue, the other wrapped in a scarf. And Miquel Barceló, bent over a canvas laid flat on the floor of his Paris studio, surrounded by still-wet paintings, in 2006.

There are 56 artists in all, from Miró to Titus-Carmel, by way of Tàpies, Motherwell, Sam Francis, Schnabel, Tuymans, Katz, Mitchell, Zao Wou-Ki, Viallat, Morellet, Venet, Garouste, Raynaud, and Combas. 23 of them have already been shown at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Bouvet Ladubay over the past 30 years, and the exhibition closes a loop more than it opens a new one.

Del Moral published, in 2003 and again in 2004, Barceló, photographies Jean Marie del Moral (Barceló, Photographs by Jean Marie del Moral), successively with Thames and Hudson, Steidl, Actes Sud, and La Fabrica. But it is here, across the eight rooms of this art center founded in 1992 at the initiative of Patrice Monmousseau, that his work perhaps finds its truest setting, between tuffeau stone and the light of the Loire Valley.

As Juliette Monmousseau, general director of the Bouvet Ladubay estate, says, as it celebrates its 170th anniversary: “This exhibition is meant as a celebration of artistic creation through the eye of photographer Jean Marie del Moral.” What remains is the quiet evidence del Moral has been tracking for half a century: the work is made far from the spotlight, in dirty boots and silence.

“Ateliers et portraits d’artistes” (Studios and Portraits of Artists), by Jean Marie del Moral, is on view until October 30, 2026, at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Bouvet Ladubay in Saint-Hilaire-Saint-Florent, France.

Del Moral Among the Painters, Fifty Years of Intimacy