Here we find James Ensor’s extrospective humour, with his way of distorting reality to better expose its flaws. His characters—often represented by testicles—much like the masks of Ostend, sneer at the world’s emptiness. But where Ensor screams, Baele also knows how to be silent, evoking a philosophy of the daily life where the arrangement of objects becomes a scene of profound mystery.

In this series, Casanova becomes a melancholic alter ego. Bart Baele does not paint the conquest, but the moment when the seducer finds himself alone before his mirror, stripped of his artifice. This is where the artist distinguishes himself, transforming the darkness of his thoughts into ironic material. His painted scenes are like confessions, and the colors used like scars.

Despite the heavy emotional weight, irony is never far away. Bart Baele finds amusement in his own torments and invites the viewer not to take despair at face value. The Casanova Paintings is an invitation to understand our own paradoxes: we are all, in some way, Casanovas of the mind, desperately seeking a beauty that eludes us, all while laughing at our own failures. A crude and beautifully human exhibition.

In this new body of work in oil on wood and canvas, the artist offers a contemporary interpretation of the figure of the hermit and the voluntary solitude of saints in their mystical quest. The exhibition is accompanied by a text by Raphaël Bories, historian and curator at the MUCEM.

In her figurative works, inspired by miniatures with vibrant colors and meticulous execution, Raphaëlle Benzimra explores the desire for transcendence through the pursuit of glory, solitude, and love. She depicts heroes in complex detailed compositions, addressing themes of battle and spiritual elevation. Drawing on the vocabulary of ancient sacred texts as well as European and Asian medieval and Renaissance painting, she revisits classical poetic works such as The Conference of the Birds and Paradise Lost. Boxing appears as a recurring metaphor, drawing parallels between the world of the ring and Middle Eastern spiritual traditions.

Raphaëlle Benzimra (born in 1999 in Paris) graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2023. That same year, she received the Bertrand-Demandolx-Dedons Portrait Prize. In 2022, she was selected for the Novembre Painting Prize in Vitry at Galerie Jean Collet. She is the recipient of the Encore! Foundation residency in La Rochelle and presented a duo exhibition with Clarisse Hahn at Galerie Jousse Entreprise in Paris in 2024. Her work is currently on view at MO.CO Panacée in Montpellier in the group exhibition L’Esprit de l’atelier, featuring students from Djamel Tatah’s studio at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, on view until May 3, 2026.

Despite having studied cinema, animation and video, Paul Gondry always comes back to graphic arts. A question that haunts every film-maker’s painting is: what is the need for leaving the moving image to one side, at least temporarily, for paint? Why prefer painting—the art of the fixed image, made of poor material and which has hardly changed over centuries—to the art of modernity that is film, with the continuity of its twenty-four images per second, sound, light and movement? Not that cinema surpasses painting, but when you make, as Paul Gondry does, clips, short films or video games such as role-playing games, what more can painting offer?

The answer is in the medium’s very nature, its artificiality being the best means of translating the visions the artist seeks to display. Painting is a must when suggestion takes precedence over narration, apparitions over incarnations, fantasy over reality. Paul Gondry’s painting is not merely about set images. Rich in details, textures and lights, it installs an atmosphere and retains a specific, haunted moment. It precipitates, focuses and emblematises. More than a picture, it is about seeking the “image’s feeling,” says the painter.

The artist likes to describe his painting as a receptacle, a tomb, a manuscript. It is the opposite of film, its residual shimmering, what survives once the screen and the light have been turned off. His painting plunges all the deeper into darkness and formlessness, from which springs the unknown, even the monstrous. His drawings search through the depths of the human psyche, examining its fantasies, illusions and dreams. It brings out images shaped by the universal unconscious, on the edge of fantasy and nightmare. Shadows, silhouettes and profiles cross the frame, as if returning from the depths and margins: they portray ghosts, elderly children, hieratic magicians or celebrants of a nocturnal ritual. This dark, almost sticky, universe is reminiscent of some of F. W. Murnau’s visions or scenes from Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) by Pier Paolo Pasolini. This world is also very Lynchian in its atmospheres and intrigues, flirting with Eraserhead(1977) or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992).

All painting, at least when informed, also incessantly crosses the infinite territories of art history and the works of the past. In Paul Gondry’s painting, such dialogues can be perceived, changing from one canvas to the next: we recognise the Nabis is some of the colour arrangements, Edvard Munch in the distorted figures, and the Surrealist painters in the chimerical visions encased in a symbolic system. Watching films by Paul Gondry, connections can also be made with the contemporary artists Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy.

His pictorial practice, which he started aged twelve, extending to comics and graphic novels, developed like an obvious path, a natural inclination. Today, this fully embraced painterly practice follows a set process: it often begins with flat areas of colour on a linen canvas in order to master the texture, then it gradually lets the drawing emerge through numerous layers of paint. Some series are based on a collage of various photographic material, reworked beyond recognition. Painting, carried out in the domestic space, surrounded by personal objects, is a solitary activity that fosters an intimate relationship with the medium: time stands still, it is “mummified,” and a personal feeling is extracted out of it.

Metamorphosis is a crucial motif in this painting: the transformation of bodies and nature, transmutation of matter, slow fading towards death. The colours contribute to this feeling. To quote Edward James about Leonora Carrington, it is as if they “have materialised in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight.” At the bottom of his alchemical crucible, Paul Gondry constructs his palette with bold, acidic montages, at the risk of dissonance: cooked and re-cooked reds, the colour of dried blood, sooty blacks, but also the somewhat supernatural light blues and greens of the aurora borealis. Colour does not describe the object; it projects the symbolic qualities and contributes to the internal balance of the composition. By so doing, Paul Gondry leans towards Symbolism, but of an esoteric kind. The picture is deciphered like a secret grimoire. Midnight suns and Van Gogh-styled starry nights make up the sky in Paul Gondry’s scenes, which are impossible to place— day interior? night exterior? The whole thing is theatrically set up, lit up by artificial lights.

Unlike cinema, where images follow each other, painting can combine several pictures in one, becoming a fixed panorama where characters and new stories coexist, like many threads towards possible narratives. Some of Paul Gondry’s compositions are reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s kaleidoscopic paintings, which must be explored slowly to be understood.

In some places, a wealth of details evoke the Orientalists’ ornamental trend, as in Gustave Moreau’s works: wrought-iron gates and other minutely worked, but never common, motifs. Paul Gondry transports his subjects into fictional spaces out of time. The pictures are inhabited by masked creatures, either naked or dressed with large togas. An elongated presence in the water inevitably brings to mind the iconography of Ophelia and the Pre-Raphaelites. The pictorial treatment varies depending on the area: passages with myriad details are juxtaposed with more abstract backgrounds, which provide projection surfaces for the viewer. Figures emerge from this substance as if on the screen of a silent film, undergoing transformations, in states of limbo.

The name of the artist-run space Paul Gondry has co-founded in New York, 15 Orient, reveals his taste for esotericism, which he shares with the Surrealists and Leonora Carrington. Some titles—such as Nigredo, an alchemical term referring to the phase of putrefaction, calcination and decomposition, the first step towards the philosopher’s stone—leave room for doubt as to his possible initiation. The artworks themselves also maintain ambiguity and resist any unequivocal interpretation. They have tipped over into the occult, where secrecy is the order of the day and words are superfluous.

Laetitia Chauvin

Compiled on poorly or not indexed blogs, his investigations from now on borrow from yesteryear naturalists, their methods of exploration, prospecting, inventorying, and mediation, in order to better break free from them. Since settling in the small village of Meillac, in Ille-et-Vilaine, the artist has fallen into a new vortex: a world populated by strangers, where time flies by at breakneck speed, space expands, and drama and sex punctuate the daily lives of filthy, harmful, parasitic, or invisible beings. Shit flies, bedbugs, moths, Temnothorax nylanderi, Isotomurus maculatus, Araneus diadematus…

The exhibition L’île aux mouches (Fly Island) is a disturbing testimony of this encounter, where, for once, everything starts from the end: the tomb of a springtail named the Pharaoh of Mycelium.

Equipped with macro lenses and logbooks, using maps, lists, and phylogenetic trees, Inspector Pinard becomes enamored with the poetry of binomial nomenclature, takes artificial taxonomies a little too far, is moved by metamorphoses, and follows the wanderings of migrations. The fabulous and fabulist worlds of insects and arachnids now dictate the artist’s asymptotic quest.

From a pupa to a doll, from a soft toy to a cuddly one, Guillaume Pinard composes an emotional bestiary, a genealogy of fetishes and projections. The fly pupa, a transitional form between larva and imago, opens up a politics of becoming, while the doll, a normative simulacrum of the human, mirrors our own metamorphoses. This soft and articulated bestiary escapes hierarchies, deadly classifications, and any promise of completion. Superheroes, reduced to textile envelopes with makeshif, costumed identities, lose their omnipotence. Exceptionalism and virility collapse in favor of a regime of care. Close to the transitional object dear to Winnicott, these figures alleviate the anxiety of the separation of worlds (children/adults; humans/non-humans; real/fictional; visible/invisible…). Contrary to a rational modernity that classifies, names, and isolates, the cocoon no longer promises the imago, the doll no longer teaches a model, the hero no longer saves the world. As emotional pieces of evidence, they become the witnesses of a non-heroic, non-spectacular reality, woven from unfinished metamorphoses, minority narratives, and precarious existences.

Marion Zilio, December 2025

As the title suggests, this exhibition and publication will take you on an astonishing journey through the artist’s career. The pluralism that reigns in contemporary art can be confusing. That is why today is a special moment to be able to overview 40 years of creativity and audacity for the artist who is considered as the  » king of street art in France  »
While many changes have taken place among painters in recent years, Speedy Graphito has consistently and coherently pursued the pictorial research he began 42 years ago.
In 1984, Speedy Graphito began expressing himself on the streets by spray-painting his character Dédé the Demon on walls using stencils. From 1985 onwards, the artist developed this character into an angel, a demon, and a horseman (notably for the event La Ruée vers l’Art, launched by the then Minister of Culture Jack Lang).
This multifaceted, free, and autonomous work invites us at each exhibition to look towards a new language. Gifted with insatiable artistic curiosity and creative drive, Speedy Graphito has experimented with (and mastered with success)
several techniques: stencils or murals, engraving, screen printing, photography, wood carving, ceramics, theater set design, music,
poetry, video… and, of course, painting on canvas.  .
This variety of techniques is not intended to show off; it serves only to give shape to an astonishing faculty of imagination.
Although Speedy Graphito’s art was born on the streets and then developed in parallel in his studio, since childhood (at the age of 12 he was making copies of Vlaminck) as his main source of inspiration: his personal pantheon, the untouchable artists, the adored,
those whose practice he mistrusts, and those who have always amazed him and shaped his life. A dream team of art brought together under his brushes.
A daring creator who continues to embody the spirituality of street art, Speedy Graphito breaks down all barriers. Retaining the essence of his forefathers’ works, he examines them, dissects them, invites them to his street artist’s table, gives them a second
life and a new form of existence, intelligently adding the imagery of mass culture.)
Painting is an art, but not all painters are artists. Speedy Graphito is, and the sequence of superbly accomplished series he has produced over the first forty years of his career proves it. The quality of an
artist depends on how he tells a story. And Speedy Graphito conveys these stories, ours and that of art, with an ease that is unique to him. Each painting is painted as if it were the most important of his life. A declaration of love for the medium.
Jean Renoir, the filmmaker, said: “Our job is to look and open windows.” Speedy Graphito, a keen observer, looks at the history of
art, his history, our ever-changing world, in a wonderful way, and opens wide new windows that are just waiting for us to see what he sees. After all, isn’t it the role of the artist to continue to surprise us?

Since the mid 2000s, Helene Appel paints, as faithfully as possible, with consummate skill, all manner of subjects—big and small, beautiful and ugly, organic and inorganic. She imparts a real presence to the life-sized subjects she paints on raw linen canvas. The formats and techniques she uses for each painting are dictated by the subjects themselves.
Embracing even the most trivial details, her works put forward a vision stripped to its essentials and far removed from any moral or metaphysical interpretation. The unvarnished truth of everyday objects is captured with unrelenting realism, preserving the perfection of the moment. There is no attempt to manipulate the eye in a trompe-l’oeil manner, instead our gaze is encouraged to seek out the inherent aesthetic qualities of envelopes, car headlights, a sewer grate, soapy water, … The apparent simplicity of bringing to life these objects through painting, opens the door to the most profound exploration of the relationship between art and reality. Or to put it more simply: “What you see is what you get… but take a better look at what you see.” To arrive at this point: don’t be satisfied with merely representing reality, create it.

Helene Appel is a graduate of the Hamburg School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. Based in Berlin, her work has been exhibited at the Museo Marino Marini in Florence, at the Drawing Room and the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, at the Städtische Galerie in Delmenhorst and at the Thalie Foundation in Brussels. Her paintings feature in numerous public and private collections such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Greece, La Gaia in Italy, the Olbricht Collection in Germany and at Touchstones, Rochdale in the UK. She is represented by the galleries The Approach in London, P420 in Bologna and Rüdiger Schottle in Munich.

Jean-Michel Othoniel’s enchanting aesthetics revolves around the notion of emotional geometry. Through the repetition of modular elements such as bricks or his signature beads, he creates exquisite jewelry-like sculptures whose relationship to the human scale ranges from intimacy to monumentality. His predilection for materials with reversible and often reflective properties—particularly blown glass, which has been the hallmark of his practice since the early 1990s—relates to the deeply equivocal nature of his art. Monumental yet delicate, baroque yet minimal, poetic yet political, his contemplative forms, like oxymorons, have the power to reconcile opposites. While his dedication to site-specific commissions for public spaces has led some of his work to take an architectural and social turn, Othoniel’s holistic sensibility compares to fêng shui, or the art of harmonizing people with their environment, allowing viewers to inhabit his world through reflection and motion.