"Nearly 15 years ago, Michèle Aittouarès called me and said, “We don’t know each other, but we love the same things—we should work together.” She was right. The years that have passed have shown that what would become our plan—working together on the things we loved—was also a beautiful definition of friendship. The carte blanche that Michèle and Odile are offering me on the occasion of the gallery’s 40th anniversary is a generous testament to this, and an opportunity for me to explain how, over all these years, I have followed in the footsteps of this shared passion: seeking in art the traces of our humanity. 

By selecting from among the gallery’s artists, I am highlighting a thread that runs from Tal Coat to Yann Bagot, from Hans Hartung to Antoine Schneck—that of artists capable of transforming the gesture into an embodied sign, one that tells us what Henri Michaux called 'the adventure of being alive.'" (Pierre Wat)

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Pierre Wat is a professor of art history at Panthéon-Sorbonne University. A specialist in European Romanticism, he has published Naissance de l’art romantique (Flammarion, 1998, reprinted in the Champs Arts collection in 2013), Constable (Hazan, 2002), andTurner, menteur magnifique (Hazan, 2010). He is the author of numerous studies on contemporary art: Pierre Buraglio (Flammarion, 2001), Claude Viallat (Hazan, 2006), and Frédéric Benrath (Hazan, 2016). Recent publications: Pérégrinations. Paysages entre nature et histoire (Hazan, 2017) and Hans Hartung, la peinture pour mémoire (Hazan, 2019).

In 2023–2024, he served as the curatorial director of the Nicolas de Staël retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris and the Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne. In 2025, he curated "Anna-Eva Bergman and Hans Hartung, And we’ll never be parted", at the Kunsthalle Praha in Prague, and "Paysages de marche" at the Musée Courbet in Ornans, an exhibition exploring the relationship between landscape and walking in the 19th century.