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.

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

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.

He will present a new body of work in which power relations are replayed and subverted. By staging scenes with his loved ones, using a combination of fiction and realism, he creates personal fables that allow him to question social determinism.

“WE’RE GONNA SHOCK THEM” is the last sentence of the last voicemail Ibrahim sent me.

When we were a bit younger, he often liked to talk about brightness when referring to the people who inspired him and whom he ended up painting.

Knowing him and observing the way he used the term, I understood that he wasn’t using it, as often, to acclaim an individual’s eloquence and academic prowess, but literally as if referring to the colorful, luminous reflections found in nature.

In them, he was able to see their colors, their shimmer, their glints, he caught their luminous auras without them needing to be in their best light, without their masks, without anyone else having to put a magnifying glass in front of his eyes, without any invitation or authorization.

Some time later, tired of the expectations of “excellence” placed on the famous immigrant children, not identifying himself with the speeches, portraits, photo albums-i*stagr*m of apparently model families and children who surrounded us, for fear of not being understood, Ibrahim began to reject the word brightness as much as he rejected the word “excellence”.

He told me “I want to make turbulent paintings!!!” and so he did.

It was hard to see Ibrahim this year, as he was too busy paying homage to dunces with large brushstrokes, because yes, turbulence is the precise word used in school reports about them and those looked at askance. Boisterous golden-browns, teeming layers of oil, tender, melancholy iridescent pinks, cosmic reds, hyperactive in all genres and horizons.

His compositions, his colors, his style, his characters reflected this promise of turbulence. But for his whirlwind speed, only his working rhythm was too regular (if not relentless) to be qualified by this word.

It was this relentlessness he immersed himself in to heal his pain, and I think he hopes that it will heal yours a little too.

An unruly child has always been the one to whom the right to be loved unconditionally (among other rights…) is most readily taken away. He or she is often also the one who tries to raise his or her average school marks by a few points thanks to art classes.

As a child, the only poem I enjoyed learning was Jacques Prévert’s Le Cancre, published in 1945,

I’ll let you look it up on the Internet or in a hopefully crumpled notebook, and rather than recite it for you, I have a few hypotheses (which are not hypotheses)

And what if, THROUGH HIS DISOBEDIENCE, they were God’s favorite child?! Not waiting for permission to carry out his or her mission.

In a world where any unpredictability is considered madness, liable to be judged, apprehended, annihilated, a world where the fearful want to control us, to locate us, What if in this world, turbulence was our salvation?!

What if they were the one who, rid of expectations and shame, could give free rein to his or her creative whirlwind and let the cosmos express itself through them?

And what if they were the one that meant making a racket in the galaxy, interstellar loudspeaker included? May the racist neighbor adapt or shut up forever.

Today, as an adult, I can tell you that being a helpful child did not help me. I love and respect the turbulent child more than anything else, because while others like me were crumbling inside to survive, the turbulent child was trying as best as he could to topple the big boot that was trying to trample them, because they knew in their heart that this boot was not right.

In any case, as they say,

I’ve got a question for you,

And to quote my dear friend,

you’re a nice guy,

But …… DO YOU KNOW A FOULEK? *

I do, and I invite you to do the same and be one yourself (if you don’t want to waste your life).

Neïla Czermak Ichti
August 2025

*Inspired by north African-Arabic language, Foulek is a french slang word used to describe someone deemed “crazy”, whose behavior can be considered carefree/careless, extravagant, and atypical, with some sort of chaotic swagger to them. There is a sense of pride and insubordination in that so called madness. Some say it might be the contraction of “fou” (crazy in french), and “belek” north African Arabic and french slang word to tell someone : “be careful”.
Foulek has also been popularized through french rap music, and notoriously by rappers such as Rohff, [whom first self made label created in 2001 was called “Foolek Empire” (The anglicization reminding of the words Fool and it’s abreviation “foo” often used and popularized by Mexican and Black people from southern California).]

In an earlier painting (that won’t be part of this exhibition), Rohff had already been depicted by artist Ibrahim Meité Sikely, as a Titan frowning upon the latter’s reminiscence of the police brutalizing a group of teenage boys, the scene taking place in the painter’s neighborhood of the labeled « 94» french department, from which both painter & rapper come from. His titanic posture both inspired by Goya’s painting “El Colosso” (“The Colossus”) made around 1808, and by the cover art of Rohff’s album “la fierté des nôtres” (“The pride of our people”) released in 2004, where in a surrealist photomontage, the rapper appears as a giant sitting on one of the most famous monuments in Paris the “Arc de Triomphe”.

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.

The strange and ethereal world of GaHee Park’s paintings is populated with doubles of various kinds. Whether as shadow figures or gleaming reflections, an extra set of limbs or lips, a bird or a woman with an extra eye, these are not identical doppelgangers but they are nevertheless uncanny. Often the effect of this doubling is something like that of a reversible image: focusing on one mouth, the figure seems content, focusing on the other mouth, she seems forlorn. Our own gaze is itself doubled by the mechanisms of Park’s skilled doubling. Borrowing a moniker once given to René Magritte, we might dub GaHee Park the Master (Mistress?) of the double take.

We may find in these doubles an echo of the duck-rabbit that fascinated Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For both, the duckrabbit reveals the phenomenon of “seeing-as.”1 Seeing is never simply seeing, it is always seeing-as; interpretation is always already at play. The painter’s gaze is particularly attentive to this fact because, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, the painter’s objects are not altogether real objects: “Light, lighting, shadows, reflections, color; like ghosts these objects have only visual existence. The painter’s gaze asks them what they do to suddenly cause something to be and to be this thing.”2 Because it can be seen as this thing or as that, the duck-rabbit illustrates the endless play permitted by the ambiguity of the image. But the figures in Park’s paintings are not like the duck-rabbit, infinitely reversing themselves and revealing the perils of interpretation. Rather, the figures that compel a double take in Park’s works show us not an either/or but a both/and. Both sets of mouths seem to belong to the same face, both sets of eyes fit the bird, the figure and her shadow are equally subjects in the painting. Unlike the reversible image which is fundamentally ambiguous, abiding by the logic of either/or, in Park’s paintings we find instead a productive ambivalence.