La Part des anges (The Angels’ Share). Carte blanche to Nicolas Dhervillers

La Part des anges (The Angels’ Share)

Depicted in all its forms – calm and storm-stricken, during the day and at night – the sky evokes humans’ relationship with nature, and often reflects the artist’s all-consuming quest in the face of a vastness that stretches beyond anything we can imagine. Resonating with the very identity of this ancient convent, the sky was an overarching poetic and artistic theme throughout 2026. As part of the ‘Breath of Fresh Air’ programme at the Musée des Augustins, we gave carte blanche to the artist Nicolas Dhervillers: the sky has been a recurrent source of inspiration for him for many years – a passion he revived and enriched for the Toulouse-based project.

Born in 1981, Nicolas Dhervillers initially made a name for himself as a photographer. His evanescent landscapes remind us of the obsessive pursual of infinite variations of light associated with famous 19th-century landscape artists such as John Constable, William Turner and Gustave Le Gray. Deliberately blurring the boundaries between photography and drawing, he gradually began exploring new avenues of artistic and conceptual experimentation.

A powerful, coherent and ambitious project – developed in the heart of the Musée des Augustins itself -, The Angels’ Share brings together a previously unseen collection of pastel and graphite drawings and photographs by the artist. Each work of art is linked in some way to the previous one: the exhibition title is a poetic way of evoking things that disappear and turn into something else, just like the portion of distilled spirits that evaporates during the aging process. Things that are removed do not disappear, they move elsewhere, turn into something else, live on in another form. The captivating, mysterious artworks of Nicolas Dhervillers are like huge windows opening onto the world: the sky becomes a vanishing line as well as a focal point, onto which each of us projects our thoughts and ambitions.

‘At this point in time, choosing to create means refusing to consider the world only in terms of damage.’

Nicolas Dhervillers