Galleries in Paris

For its 40th anniversary, the gallery proposes to end 2025 with two nods to its own history. The last exhibition of the year will be a solo show by Speedy Graphito, the very first artist represented by the gallery. And for October, Bernard Utudjian invited me to imagine a hanging of Joël Ducorroy’s works. Delight. Conceptual Art and Nouveau Réalisme were born from a meeting between a gallerist and an art 2 critic. Joël and Bernard ceased their collaboration long ago,yet the link and the influence remain obvious—what is generated in the interactions between a young artist and his young gallerist in the effervescence of the mid-1980s.

Collaborations and relationships have been the subject of several of my recent curatorial propositions. I enjoyed conceiving the exhibition starting from the works available here and now, in the drawers and on the shelves of storage, teasing memories and archives, pinning to the wall for the first time preparatory drawings, plunging—amused—into a lesser-known history of the gallery, multiplying the multiples. Making non-choice into a choice. œuvres (1986–1993) is an exhibition of constraint, posed/thought/conducted like a concept, an Oulipian principle. It holds its name high, it is truly what it says, at least what we read! Joël Ducorroy — œuvres (1986–1993), illumination indeed.

The artist interrogates the authority of the sign. He elaborates an unprecedented plastic language by substituting for the image its verbal designation engraved on license plates, standardized objects born of industrial production. This radical post-pop, neo-conceptual gesture actualizes anew the debates of the time concerning the place of sign and language in contemporary art. In an era when the selfie did not exist, he also posed the place of making—the one who delegates fabrication but not composition. His artistic practice is a singular variation on the same question: how does language, when placed within a platetistic3 artistic device, become image, object, and work? Joël Ducorroy recognizes the world he lives in, knows its proximities. I like to attach to him the words of a painter, the first “modernist,” Édouard Manet, railing against the injunction: “…one must be of one’s own time and paint what one sees. »4 Joël Ducorroy seizes it, diverts it, skirts it. He makes us read what we see, makes painting without brush. He is a painter as the Bechers5 are sculptors.

To look at the history of an artistic practice over time, woven between Paris and New York, mingled with attempts and confidences, with debates and rebounds. The porosities of the everyday become the fields, the soil of creation, with intelligence and humor, when art and poetry, parody and détournement were integral to life, to thought, to love and friendships; creating, editing, fabricating… Joël Ducorroy belongs to that generation of multiple affinities, filiations with Fluxus and the critique of society of the Nouveaux Réalistes. He saw and digested Pop Art, inscribed himself within the inheritances of the conceptuals’ acts, of Supports/Surfaces and Art & Language, encountered Warhol, exchanged with Gainsbourg—who whispered to him the phrase of his first plate—, nourished himself, talks endlessly with his friend Raymond Hains and Jean-Claude Lange in the garden of the Hôtel Windsor in Nice. An time.

In Paris, he had a gallerist who was also an author and publisher; the Polaris gallery produced with him numerous works and his first multiples. The artist’s practice unfolded, sometimes emancipating itself from the license plate object in order to pass through photography, bronze, engraving, silkscreen, or reprography. The words remain. Writing is painting speech. Writing and amusing oneself. Reading, looking, picturing.

The plate assumes at once the role of material, of sign, and of form. It blurs the borders between language and image. Imagining is choosing. Today, the walls of the gallery take on the universal colors of license plates: blue, yellow, green, black, white. The Portrait d’Evguenie, that of Mme B, or the Casse-croûte filling will be the same for no one, just like this Paysage romantique. René Magritte was already initiating this in 1928 with Le masque vide; Joël Ducorroy radicalizes it,6 suppresses all figuration. This constant play between absence and presence, text and object, seriousness, parody and facetiousness, makes Joël Ducorroy’s œuvre a contemporary reflection on the materiality of language and on the very nature of the artwork.

Portrait, landscape, still life: the classical genres of art history are dismantled then reassembled into verbal units, disseminated throughout the exhibition space like shards of an absent reality. Art also looks at itself; the artist casts it into mise en abyme: ŒUVRE, ŒUVRE NON ENCADRÉE, ŒUVRE ENCADRÉE, PHOTO, GRAVURE SUR BOIS, TITRE, PETIT FORMAT, MULTIPLE, LISTE DES PRIX, Ben’s CARTEL, Rebecca Horn’s CARTEL, Joseph Beuys’ CARTEL… Thus are discovered the collections and the unpublished texts in small companion books to a plate; there are also the fruit bowls and the cans, the meals organized by the gallery through the MENU. One word one plate one color, plates words paintings. The artist declines plated words, images and paintings, the gallerist conceives productions and editions, they play at multiplications. Joël Ducorroy’s works have, then, this extravagance: their very reality, and the ensemble of what can exist once we see them—hyperphantasic and aphantasic , poets and Cartesians, lovers of art history and realists [hyper or nouveaux, for that matter]. Thus, writing is painting speech, to give us to read is to see and even to imagine! And so, if imagining is choosing, and choosing is renouncing, would we renounce imagining? Let us wager not. The eye was on the plate and gazed at the BHV9 !10

Émilie Flory
Manosque, September 2025

1. Jean Giono, Noé, 1947, Éditions Gallimard, collection Blanche.
2. Gallerist, publisher, exhibition curator, and American theorist Seth Siegelaub (1941–2013) was a key figure of New York Conceptual Art in the 1960s–70s. He revolutionized artistic practices by dematerializing the artwork (objectless exhibitions, artist’s books). He played a decisive role in making the movement visible, being the first to promote Sol LeWitt, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Lawrence Weiner, and Joseph Kosuth, whose theoretical texts he also disseminated. In France, Pierre Restany (1930–2003) was the art critic who, in the early 1960s, gathered the artists and theorized Nouveau Réalisme, formulating their manifesto and defending their approach of appropriating reality as a critical response to consumer society.
3. Derived from platetician, a neologism combining “plastician” and “plate”, adopted by the artist to define himself, after discussions with Lange and Hains.
4. Édouard Manet quoted by Antonin Proust in the chapter Les jeunes of his book Édouard Manet: Souvenirs, 1913. Librairie Renouard / Henri Laurens Éditeur.
5. In 1990, photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher received the Golden Lion for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale, for the entirety of their entire (photographic!) body of work.
6. There exist two versions of René Magritte’s painting Le masque vide, both dated 1928: one figurative, and one textual. The latter is held at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
7. Translation in english of the titles: WORK, UNFRAMED WORK, FRAMED WORK, PHOTOGRAPH, WOODCUT, TITLE, SMALL FORMAT, MULTIPLE, PRICE LIST…
8. Hyperphantasia designates the capacity to produce mental images that are extremely vivid and detailed, while aphantasia corresponds to the difficulty—or even the impossibility—of forming them.
9. Between 1983 and 1993, Joël Ducorroy had his license plates fabricated at the BHV (Bazar de l’Hôtel de ville) stand, in Paris.
10. Reference to the last line of Victor Hugo’s poem La Conscience (1859): The eye was in the grave and gazed on Cain. The verse evokes a universal truth about guilt and redemption, illustrating the idea that guilt follows the guilty everywhere, even into death. Here, consumer society symbolized by the BHV is called into question across time by the artist’s gaze. A wink as well to Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux’s work L’œuf était dans la poêle et regardait Colomb (1996, Collection Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux).