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.

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.

For the artist, the idea is not to paint a model in a traditional sense, through poses and artifice, as has occurred throughout art history, but to attempt to capture an individuality, a particular presence, usually through a “non-pose,” with the model choosing to get involved or not. This distinctive approach rejects any staging by painting directly from life, far from social constructions or mediations imposed by contemporary gazes.

For a French audience, the work of Japanese artist Mr. is strangely familiar, as it draws on imagery that has become almost ubiquitous. Since the 1980s, anime films, video games, and manga have permeated youth culture almost as much as American productions. Their visual influence is reminiscent of the impact of ukiyo-e (« floating world ») in late 19th-century Europe and its decisive role in the advent of Modernism. Many contemporary Japanese artists combine and fuse these different visual styles, like the Superflat movement of the 1990s. According to Takashi Murakami, its theorist and foremost exponent, Superflat is not simply a Japanese « pop art » inspired by the entertainment industry. It rather affirms the legitimacy of youth culture aesthetics while embracing the legacy of traditional painting and Buddhist iconography, such as two-dimensionality.
Starting out as Murakami’s assistant, Mr. has become an ambassador for otaku, a Japanese term for people who are obsessively absorbed in video games and anime, primarily online. Roughly translated as « geek » or « nerd, » it has the same disparaging connotation. Mr. works in a wide range of media, including painting, watercolor, sculpture, installation, film, and photography – all of which reflect his passion for contemporary Japanese popular aesthetics.
Most of his works are portraits of teenage girls with the typical features of anime characters: large eyes highlighted in pink, slightly upturned noses that gradually disappear, mobile mouths, closed or gaping, and attractive outfits that range from school uniforms to colorful Kawaii fashion. The girls are often at the center of the works, surrounded by pixelated figures from video games, everyday objects, and Latin and Sino-Japanese typography. Despite their ambiguity – to which we’ll return later – for a European observer, these nymphets are symbols of Japanese soft power. They also evoke the sultry prints of the Edo period known as shunga, even though their eroticism is much more discreet, even latent.
Despite championing otaku, Mr. never completely locks himself away. His work is also influenced by Western urban subcultures, particularly graffiti, which shares many key characteristics with otaku. Both are associated with youth culture, « geekiness, » and male marginality and separateness, often facing incomprehension and rejection. Graffiti can also be understood as a form of pop art, as it freely combines North American mass culture, comics and cartoons, record sleeve and comic book typography, science fiction films, and TV series. Lastly, like otaku culture, graffiti has been revitalized by the internet in terms of form and reach. (…) Stéphanie Lemoine

Johan Creten explores the conditions under which a work appears in the real. The artist presents contemporary social mores in different contexts, such as public, domestic, and white cube spaces. Using a title1 that references art history (specifically Joseph Beuys’ 1965 performance at Schmela Gallery in Düsseldorf during which he explained art to a dead hare2) and the contemporary world, the exhibited pieces form a narrative, plastic, and political whole. The sculptor-ceramist studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Ghent and then at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he worked on performance art before shifting his focus to the object. Johan Creten works with clay and bronze, not only for their plastic potential but also for their intrinsic narratives. Clay represents the foundation of a society in the making, while bronze tells us about our relationship with history, mainly through monuments.

The exhibition features a collection of bas-reliefs, sculptures, and furniture sculptures. Like Beuys and Austin, Creten is concerned with language: La Langue ( The Tongue/ The Language) was the object of the artist’s first performance in 1986 while still a student at the Beaux-Arts. Exhibited during the day at Galerie Meyer, near the Beaux-Arts, the artist took the sculpture with him across the city at night. C’est dans ma nature (It’s in My Nature), from the eponymous project (2001 – 2021), and La Rencontre (The Encounter) explore the transmission of cultural heritage in a setting where the living no longer occupies center stage. Mounted on rolling panels, the pieces were used to restore damaged housing facades in Aulnay-sous-Bois and Mechelen. Can one story conceal another? In a rapidly changing world in search of ideals of stability, Creten often refers to Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of Bees, which presents the beehive as a model for a communal utopia where everyone works for the common good.

Small bronze figures cast in lost wax3 on a platform present a half-human, half-animal bestiary. Like characters from the Commedia dell’arte, grasshopper, wild boar, sheep, seahorse, Hypocrite, dead fly, and herring woman from a merry theatrical troupe. The scale of the figures contrasts with the grandeur and norms of traditional public monuments. (…) Agnès Violeau

Perrotin is pleased to present Portrait Mode, a solo exhibition by Xavier Veilhan in Paris. The portrait mode seems like the renewal of a historical genre through its digital transformation: the por- trait (and the self-portrait) has proliferated endlessly. In the exhi- bition, the portrait is presented in two dimensions (by combining the techniques of marquetry and painting) and in three dimen- sions (using digital sculptures of solid wood, among others). The subjects are friends of the artist, members of the studio staff, and everyday animals (birds). Here, the self-celebration of each indi- vidual through the image is replaced by the celebration of all through the object.

The seats by Vico Magistretti and Rick Owens that furnish the studio were used during the sittings. They are reproduced in a smaller size in the statues but also “physically present” in the space: they serve as a living room suite so that the artist can comfortably receive and interact with the visitors.
There is a term that Xavier Veilhan often uses when talking about his work: presence. The presence in the space of the sculptures and of the images that are freed from the two-dimensionality of the wall by materializing as bas-reliefs or illusionistic volumes. The presence of spectators’ bodies walking around perfectly designed exhibitions in the form of gardens or synthetic landscapes. The presence of pas- sersby who share the urban space with his statues of animals, anon- ymous people, monsters, and architects. The presence of the moving bodies of the performers and dancers who often appear in his films or shows.

Every child has feared them, every adult remembers them: they have inspired Japanese artists for centuries.
Are Izumi Kato’s beings from this earth or, as is sometimes claimed, aliens from another planet? But Japan already created this non-terrestrial world centuries ago, a realm that is infra- or supra-, rather than extra-terrestrial. Here, as is well known in Japan, strangeness resides. This also applies to Izumi Kato’s odd creatures, shamanic and disturbing, melancholic yet burlesque, close cousins of the creatures produced by the visionary, defiant, and mischievous brush of the great painter Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-1889). Once begun, this game of correspondence never ceases to shed light on Kato’s work. The distinctive appearance of his faces, with their enlarged eyes, often without pupils, the whole shaped by nose and mouth, the impression of being covered with ritual make-up, all this has numerous echoes in the fantastical prints produced in the 19th century, during the latter part of the Edo period and the Meiji era of Imperial Japan (1868-1912).
Kato’s work must be considered in relation to Utagawa Kunyoshi’s prints (1797-1861), one of the masters of the genre. In the work of Kunyoshi, the yokai are startling hybrids with bulging eyes, large jaws, and strange faces that seem like theatrical masks.
But above all the yokai are ambiguous beings from a world whose creative powers seem endless. Looking at the hand- and footless limbs of Kato’s “characters”, one is reminded of Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi’s playful prints of « demon-shaped plants » (1844-1847). Yet what sets Izumi Kato’s creatures apart from all this pleasant, swaggering bluster is their silence. His work is characterized by a seriousness absent from the other works