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

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”.

Nothing in Alun Williams’s paintings is quite what it seems to be – or to put it more accurately, there is a lot more to everything than we might think at first acquaintance. Williams’s apparently straightforward recent works can seem to depend on the artist’s ability to invent wholly contemporary, engaging images – irresistible but unsentimental donkeys in a landscape, for example – and to exploit the physical expressiveness of his materials – roughly stroked paint on a coarse support or fluid ink on paper. But we soon become aware of the rigorous conceptual basis, at once deeply serious and playful, that informs these works. Williams comments on our present condition, in part by forcing those of us who pay attention to art to search our mental image banks, happily recognizing familiar works of art or struggling to retrieve obscure ones. What is it about that landscape background that seems familiar? Why do I feel that I’ve seen that setting not long ago? Isn’t that figure something I know from another context? In his most recent works, we are also forced to think about the ubiquitous media images of present day horrors.

That sense of fleeting familiarity is not an illusion. Williams deliberately rings changes on motifs from other works of art, as well as images of real places. It’s not appropriation but rather something closer to the way T.S. Eliot allowed his broad knowledge and appreciation of the literature of the past to resonate in his writing. Much of Williams’s earlier work was informed by scrupulous research into the history of locations he frequented or the neighborhoods of places where he exhibited or worked. He would discover a configuration – a paint stain or roadmark or inflection in a wall, among many other sources – that became a surrogate for a leading personage in the history. The configuration, now an autonomous character, was depicted in images based on the generating location, sometimes in the company of other characters in the story. Often, a related group of works would present several moments in the life of the protagonist, whom we learned to recognize in various settings.

Williams’ recent works are no less layered and allusive. They seem to have been stimulated equally by his knowledge of the history of art, especially modern art, and the disturbing state of our troubled world. The alarming news from the mid-east has been encapsulated by odalisques who appear to be refugees from the fictive North African Arcadia that Henri Matisse constructed with props and textiles in his Provençal studio. The newly energetic women gather in a group, armed with assault rifles, or sit amid the rubble in the aftermath of a bombing raid, subverting any lingering associations with an idealized world of idleness and pleasure. Donkeys, based on representations from artists as disparate at Franz Marc and Jean-Michel Basquiat, become ambassadors for everything from animal welfare, to brute labor, to endurance, to patience, at the same time that they remind us that they are symbols of the American Democratic party. In the apparently bucolic Crisis of Democracy #2 (Thomas Paine meets John Adams) (2023), two leading figures in the American Revolution, represented by dramatically different surrogates, shake hands in front of a New England house, watched by sympathetic donkeys.

Elsewhere we find everything from elusive echoes to forthright reinventions of such wide-ranging sources as 17th century landscape painting and the work of John Constable, Vincent van Gogh, George Grosz, and Max Ernst, unified by Williams’s vigorous touch and evocative orchestration of hues. The images that serve as points of departure range from the familiar to the obscure. Whatever the starting point, Williams treats it with insouciance and invention, so that we are as engaged by his transformation of his sources as we are by recognizing or sensing the origin of the image. We are fascinated by the tension between the associations provoked by the usually benign source images and Williams’s insertions and alterations, which can range from personages from the art world to explosive suggestions of destruction. An allusion to a Constable landscape, for example, is almost overwhelmed by an image derived from recent media coverage of war. We are confronted by absorbing metaphors for the state of the world, perhaps even for the artist’s role in these troubled times as someone who bears witness, at the same that we are reminded, now overtly, now subliminally, of the long, enduring history of visual art. There’s no such ambiguity about the iterations of a jaunty, grotesque, cigarette-smoking Angel of War, conjured up in various material guises, at once sinister and bitterly funny. Once again, Williams has invented a memorable “character” who embodies complex meanings in a kind of visual shorthand, a potent emblem of our disturbing moment.

The art world, particularly the world of modernist icons, comes under scrutiny as well. Williams has updated Max Ernst’s Au Rendez-vous des Amis, his 1922 homage to nascent Surrealism. Painted two years before the publication of André Breton’s first manifesto defining the movement and named for a café, the large canvas presents portraits of fifteen of Ernst’s friends and colleagues, including Breton, Giorgio de Chirico, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, and his wife Gala, plus (presumably as precursors) Fyodor Dostoevsky and Raphael, as well as a self-portrait of the artist. Williams has substituted more recent pivotal figures in his version of the painting, New York Rendezvous: Joan Mitchell, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, Marcel Duchamp, Barnett Newman, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Jeff Koons, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Nancy Spero. Where possible, Williams has based his representations on extant self-portraits; where no prototype exists, as for Pollock, he has invented an image derived from the artist’s work. Paul Cézanne, standing in Dostoevsky, is derived from a portrait of the artist by Dan Flavin. If we make the effort to identify Williams’s characters, we begin to wonder about who was included and who omitted. Is this a personal pantheon? Was inclusion determined by chronology. We can only guess.  Recent drawings, notable for both tonal subtlety and enlivening contrast, commemorate Jasper Johns’s, Robert Rauschenberg’s, and Cy Twombly’s visit to Robert Motherwell’s 1952 exhibition at Kootz Gallery or present an agile Louise Bourgeois at home.

Kenneth Noland, a painter notably absent from Williams’s overview of the recent New York art world, said that “When you look at a great painting, it’s like a conversation. It has questions for you. It raises questions in you.” Williams’s recent work certainly raises provocative questions. If we are attentive enough, it might even provide some answers.

Karen Wilkin
New York, October 2024

Karen Wilkin is an art critic, independent curator of modern and contemporary art, writer, teacher and art historian.
A close associate of Clement Greenberg from the 1970s until his death, she organized numerous museum exhibitions, often solo shows on artists such as Stuart Davis, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Helen Frankenthaler and Hans Hofmann. She has also curated numerous group shows exploring the nature of painting today, such as those in which she presented the work of Alun Williams in New York: The Body in Question at The Painting Center, (2021) and What only Paint can do at Triangle Gallery (2012).
Karen Wilkin is the author of several important monographs on the artists named above, as well as on others such as Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, Giorgio Morandi and Kenneth Noland…
She writes regularly for : Art in America, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review et The Hopkins Review. She teaches at the New York Studio School.

On the occasion of her second exhibition at the gallery, Liv Schulman will present her new film Un círculo que se fue rodando.

The film was made on the streets of Buenos Aires, with actors, friends and aunts of the artist. It paints a psychiatric portrait of a society in permanent crisis, through a parade of T-shirts with axiomatic slogans. A number of puppets wearing the same T-shirts, suspended in the gallery space, watch over visitors.  The words quickly spread across the street, mixing with the ambient noise and forming a “collective ballet” that would allow each individual to be in one and the same group, and to exchange.

The exchange of money is a recurring theme in her film, warning that the peso is becoming extremely weak and that the dollar is gradually taking over more and more space. It’s easy to see how Argentina’s economic and societal crisis is distressing the people, who try, as best as they can, to reassure themselves by talking about light and surreal subjects such as astrology, esotericism and the new occultist religion, until “Politics becomes esoteric to cope with the crisis.” (1)

A dozen years later, invited by Anne Barrault to create a different form of narrative in her gallery, David B. resumed his research on his brother, whose health was deteriorating. He wanted to “draw something that would represent all [his] brother’s crises one by one, drawing them one after the other”[1]. Spread over 72 drawings, the exhibition “Mon Frère et le roi du monde” (My Brother and the King of the World) confronts 36 portraits of his brother with 36 portraits of the “King of the World” (created by René Guénon in an eponymous book). These two walls of 36 drawings create links between the works in a variety of ways. They blur the boundaries between good and evil, right and wrong, today and yesterday, inside and outside.

Haunted by the recent death of his brother at the end of 2023, David B. has embarked on a new series of drawings about his sibling. “It’s what comes naturally to me, the desire to draw him, what he was, what he did, what he didn’t do. To bring him to life, in a way.”[1] These vivid recent memories from the last night David B. spent with his brother are marked by a spoken and sung monologue, incomprehensible – like a luminous and serene agony. Unanswered questions remain about how his older brother, gradually deprived of part of his memory and the use of a language, might feel. In these drawings, it is his brother’s body that takes centre stage. “The body is very important because my brother’s body has been very much affected. His illness, his epileptic seizures and the fact that he fell and hurt himself.” A body damaged by falls and medication, dislocated from the inside, fragmented, losing its usual connections. This “brother in pieces” that David B. draws, he has “often seen it as if each fall shattered a piece of him”. But it’s also a body that reads, attached to words – those in his mother’s books, those he speaks, and the new language he creates. A triptych deals with “The invention of writing”, and letters emerge from bodies.

David B. has lived in Bologna for several years, where he produced this series of drawings. He uses and mixes ink, gouache, acrylic and pencil, in his favourite black, white and grey palette. He paints and draws on a variety of papers, some of which have been salvaged and cut to the 30 x 40 cm format (that of the comic strips, and of what can be easily transported): it’s a question of adapting to their absorption and dilution capacities. These drawings are developed over a long period of time, even though the project is laid out in advance, in a notebook, in the form of a rough matrix. The future drawings are sketched boxes with titles; “often I start with the title, and I find a drawing that corresponds to a title”. There are several titles per page, and you can navigate through this notebook like in a gallery of paintings, or like in a slightly abstract storyboard, where reading the titles builds an enigmatic story. David B. cultivates the need to let himself be guided by the creative process, doing touch-ups, if necessary, that gradually come together: “I do everything directly on the final page, which doesn’t mean I work quickly, I think a lot. If it doesn’t work, I erase it and come back to it. I paint over it. It’s hardly surprising, then, to find in his current acquaintances two important figures of the surrealist movement, the French painter André Masson (whom he rediscovered as told by Michel Leiris), and the Italian writer, painter and brother of Georgio Di Chirico, Alberto Savinio. Here words and singular works of art, some of them little-known, come together to build worlds out of things that don’t exist together. David B. draws us into this revelation of the invisible through his ability to transcribe an imaginary world of incredible fertility, tainted of tragedy.

Camille de Singly
April 2024

Three decades in the making, the artist has chosen his side: presentation takes precedence over representation, and the anthropological impact of painting prevails over the scholarly history of the medium. Failing to put his finger on it, the artist himself, a stoic at heart, is incredulous (2).  Doesn’t he sum up his endless quest as follows: “Art helps us to try and see together what is in front of us”. So here are five paintings. The colors are vivid: purple, magenta, bright red, dark blue and a hint of green. As to the shapes, they are brilliant, refusing to choose between molecular scale and planetary boundaries. To be more precise, they are sketches of possibilities, born from an ordinary choreography.

Dominique Figarella’s process always starts with a gesture: he begins randomly, moving his arms and legs in every possible configurations. He will then rework the traces left on the canvas. The artist is going to rewrite, for months, these large eruptive jets made in a fraction of a second, with small geometrical shapes made with crayon. In order “to literalize the movements” as he says, a way to to free himself from solipsistic expression.  In fact, any human who lingers through the exhibition has already become a part of a quest: we already seek to decipher together, dreaming as one. As we leave, we may also come away with a new idea of painting as a “participatory culture”(3).

Ingrid Luquet-Gad

Tiziana La Melia will present paintings whose shapes are inspired by the house, a square topped by a triangle to symbolize the roof. As she explains, her family came from Italy and settled in Canada. Arriving in a foreign country, the need to find a place where to live and put down roots was vital. For Tiziana La Melia, this need was also tinged with an ambivalent feeling. The house can be a refuge, but can also become the place of female confinement. She remembers her grandmother in Italy, obliged to assume her role as a “housewife”. When the house becomes the only center of a woman, whom society describes as a “housewife”.

Dolores Hayden has dedicated a book to “ the first American women who have identified the economic exploitation of female domestic work by men as being at the root of inequality between the sexes*.

Stéphanie Saadé will present House Plan. Here the artist, with sand paper has removed a trace of paint in each of the rooms, which make up her apartment. Once used, the sandpaper forms the plan of her flat. Paradoxically with her attempt to reproduce her place of living by cutting this abrasive piece of paper, Stéphanie Saadé speaks to us of exile and displacement.

To come and touch, to rub the walls in order to smell the space, understand it, listen to its history, but also leave a trace before a new departure. As Emmanuele Coccia explains in his book “la Philosophie de la maison”, we occupy places that have been inhabited by people we have not known, and in turn, we will leave these spaces to other newcomers.

Jochen Gerner will present the pages of an Ikea catalogue he has completely recovered, removing every furniture and objects and only leaving visible the architecture of the room.

The catalogue is organized by room: Living room, Dining-room, Working-room, Sleeping-room… each moment of the day and night corresponds to a room. We are invited to stroll in our homes according to the time of the day. Does human being shape space, or does space shape  human being?

In his book Espèce d’espaces, Georges Perec proposes, “ a division based not on circadian rhythms but on heptadian ones:  this would give us apartments of seven rooms, respectively called: Monroom, tuesroom, wenesroom, thursroom, friroom and sunroom.”

Bertrand Dezoteux’s En attendant Mars is modeled on Mars 500, a Russian experimental capsular life simulation program launched in 2010. The aim was to reproduce, for 520 days, – the duration of a round-trip flight to Mars- the life conditions of a crew in a strangely wainscoted tight space, in order to measure the physical and psychological repercussions of such a flight. En attendant Mars re-enacts fragments of this simulated spatial life.

Berger&Berger will present a selection of advertisements from French, German and Italian Architecture magazines, in the sixties to the eighties. They examine the History of the presence of advertisements in architecture magazines and the place of woman, of the objectivized body and of the picture of the architect in contemporary advertising. These images build the idea of an ideal house.

Katharina Bosse will present a photograph entitled Dean Martin Room.Is it an advert for an interior, a sofa or a lamp? None of that. In the nineties, the artist made a series of photographs entitled “Realms of Signs, Realms of Senses” in which she photographed rooms in hotels where no one under 18 was allowed. These places offer various surroundings, from a prison to a boudoir or an operating room. So architecture becomes an object of fantasy.

Jagdeep Raina, a Canadian artist of Kashmir origin, mainly does embroidery. A way, for him, to reconnect with his origins. He takes up a female practice intimately linked to the interior of home. But here, there is no longer a home. Since 1947 Kashmir has been quartered in three countries: India, Pakistan and China. In his works, he creates imageries, which allows a phantasmagorical recovery of this place through transmission belief, creation and love.

*La grande révolution domestique, une histoire de l’architecture féministe” by Dolores Hayden, published in France in 2023, ((1982 in the United State

The drawings and texts by Julie Doucet proliferate, most of the time together (as if hand in hand), on paper and beyond. Originally, they appeared on ordinary sheets of paper (at hand reach – she says), photocopied, folded, cropped and stapled, then handed out like that (from hand to hand, you might say), just like that. Soon, they were published, and then felt like being different. For example, they appeared from cutouts and collages, and became poetry. This is their story: from the first fanzines, the now cult Dirty Plotte in the late 1980s, to this first solo show in Paris, in 2023.

A story, which also includes the Grand Prix of the Angoulême Festival in 2022, awarded twenty years after she had given up the world of comics.

For Julie Doucet’s drawings and texts have to do with the answers given by Linda Nochlin in her article “Why haven’t there been any great female artists?“. When she started working, artistic circles were so male-dominated that the rare women present did not dare call themselves feminists. They had to find strategies. Talking about sex and tampax was one of them. The American journalist Ann Elizabeth Moore, in the preface to the large Maxiplotte compilation (available for consultation in the exhibition) describe this bias as a “Fuck You, Fuck Me feminism”, a post-punk feminism, which was not afraid of getting its hands dirty (them again).

So, today, in the white cube of the gallery, in the shape of a photo novel, a leporello novel, new collages, sometimes with a soundtrack, as in her videos, Julie Doucet’s drawings and texts breathe. A kind of philosophy, both personal and inclusive, emerges, as if through their dotted lines.

Vanessa Morisset

It is often said, and rightly so, that talismans are all about protection. They protect against the forces of evil, ward off the evil eye, and give courage in the face of adversity. For my part, I like to think of talismans as the catalysts of faith. We leave our emotions in them -sadness, anger, love, happiness- and the magical object changes this emotional matter into a very dark substance able to connect us to the world. This substance, sometimes called “trust” or “faith”, but everybody knows it is mainly love. At a time of necessary struggles, talismans tell love stories, which are also our stories, and have always been so.

The word superstition comes from the Latin superstes, which means “survival”, that is to say, in this context, “survival of tradition”. Thus, the forms and practices derided by the mighty who call them superstitions, are actually genuine haunts of ghosts. From this point of view, these traditions are not hackneyed dogmas,  but are collective ways of being related to what is around us, whether visible or invisible. Superstitious people easily make friends with ghosts. Their rooms and pockets are full of various talismans, which form a kind of system with the talismans of their friends. In fact this system is a counter-system, an alternative path, an obscure device so that not to be seen by power and make the most precious and most clandestine resource of the world thrive: love. Our talismans look like us, but do not belong to us. They emphasize our emotions while reminding us that we are not alone, and that the worlds we dream of are possible.  I do not know exactly why, but I have always felt that the painted or drawn people by Neïla had talismans in their pockets. Even better, their eyes, their gaze were, by nature, deeply talismanic.

Neïla makes her friends cry with laughter. He writes texts, which are both tribute and ways of restoring justice. She is sometimes afraid she has chosen the dark side of the force. And I understand them all the more as I share this fear. Power would have us believe that only light and whiteness are able of spreading good. This is not the case. Let us stop demonizing demons. Most of time, they are only creatures who, like us, hold fast to the idea of multiple worlds. Creatures who dream of other worlds, travel in other worlds, build other worlds. Moreover, is it not significant that the word “demon” is, in French, the anagram of the word world “monde”? In the opinion of society, demons are terrible. And indeed their bodies in daylight are frightening to see. But when it gets dark, you can hear them tell sweet stories, which are nearly always stories of revolt and love. Neïla’s work, in this sense, is somehow deeply demoniac: it takes us into the realm of shadows, as if to show us that this realm is a heart whose pulse carries endlessly the tears of laughter of those we will cherish for ever.