Casa MB is pleased to present Night blooming Jasmine, an exhibition of new works by Anatole Heger. The exhibition will open on Saturday, May 16, 2026 in Los Angeles, CA.
In Anatole Heger’s recent paintings, memory does not arrive as a fixed image but as an atmosphere, mutable, unstable, and charged with sensation. Working in acrylic, oil, oil pastel, graphite, and mixed media across canvas, linen, and wood panel, the Belgian-born artist constructs scenes that hover between recollection and invention. Figures drift through nocturnal beaches, glowing pools, volcanic landscapes, and dreamlike domestic spaces, often appearing less as protagonists than as witnesses to the emotional weather around them. Drawn from photographed childhood memories and a life shaped by movement, travel, and cultural displacement, Heger’s paintings resist autobiography’s usual clarity, transforming experience into something stranger and more elemental.
Across the exhibition, landscape becomes porous, no longer a stable ground but an extension of the self. In Suspirium, a dark volcanic form rises against a blue-black sky, its summit burning with a spectral, almost bodily flame. A solitary figure, cropped at the lower edge of the canvas, looks on from the threshold of the image, as if encountering a memory too large to fully enter. This tension between recognition and dissolution animates works such as Beach castle, LA, and Shark fishing in Oman, Mirbat, where castles glow beneath crescent moons, helicopters hover over gridded cityscapes, and fishermen stand within pastel atmospheres that feel at once specific and impossible.
Heger treats the picture plane as a site of controlled chaos, allowing the world to fracture into color, symbol, and sensation while still preserving the intimacy of lived experience. In Movin’ in on you, a horse-drawn carriage appears in a fogged, blue-green field, its sweetness unsettled by the looming atmosphere around it. Midnight pool stages a group of figures at a billiards table under hanging lights, their bodies softened and partially obscured, as though remembered through humidity or glass. In Bain de soleil and Spaceship, bodies dissolve into radiant fields of blue, caught between immersion, flight, and disappearance.
If Heger’s paintings are diaristic, they are not confessional. They are memoirs filtered through atmosphere, carrying traces of California, Oman, Los Angeles, childhood, nightlife, travel, and fantasy without settling into narrative sequence. Instead, they form a psychic geography, an inner and outer world continually in motion. Heger’s palette, shifting between warm coral, icy blue, nocturnal navy, and vaporous turquoise, functions less as description than as temperature, registering feeling before fact. What emerges is a body of work concerned with the fragile boundary between the personal and the mythic, capturing the Earth not as scenery, but as a living organism, a shifting field of light, texture, memory, and elemental force.
Anatole Heger (b. 2003, Belgium) has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 2022. He has participated in residencies at Le Consulat in Paris and Mohilef Studios in Los Angeles, where he has been based from 2023 to 2026. Heger’s work has been presented in exhibitions including Anatole’s Diary at New Image Art, Los Angeles; 30 Years of New Image in Los Angeles; Elsewhere, Trace, and Proximities with Tappan in Los Angeles and New York; Drift at Slip House, New York; Paging Dr. Feelgood at Perrotin, Los Angeles; and Wildtype with Tappan in Dallas. His work has also been shown at Felix Art Fair with Entrance, New York, and at NADA Miami and NADA New York with New Image Art.