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.

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?

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.

He’s known for his abundance of ideas. At each of his exhibitions, we anxiously await his way of seeing our world, of exposing human beings with all their weaknesses and faults. We also look forward to his caustic humor, his devastating poetry, his way of telling us about the reality of the world, of describing the phenomena that surround us from our humble position.

Combining the tragic and the grotesque, the scenes, which can be situated between nightmares and dreams, give the artist the opportunity to explore the theater of humanity in minute detail.

His often socially-critical works denounce many things, but also point the way to possible hope. Marcos Carrasquer uses painting to restore a bit of order to this confused society. And as he points out, none of his works can, unfortunately, transcend our everyday reality. His painting, then, is the conscience of our society.

We’ll forgive him for spying on us so joyfully, for dissecting us so maliciously, for making us his raw material, with derision, digesting and spitting out our failings with dexterity of brush and pen, and mastery of detail.At his fingertips, paint becomes a weapon of intelligence, opening our eyes. Not everything is pretty to look at, and this weapon can hurt, because we’re not in fiction painting, but what irony! So many truths! About human beings, about our history, our society, our culture. What a powerful freedom of expression! One of the best French painters today, who is gradually gaining international recognition thanks to the seriousness of his subjects, which he treats with extraordinary technique as a painter and draftsman.

Inspired by moments shared on the shores of the Hérault river in the Cévennes, this series is to be discovered as a contemporary story.

It is based on a desire for poetic realism.  The tribute is dedicated to Ronan, Ulrich, Jordan, Romain, Marius, Youri, Ombry, Lucas… his lifelong friends, his faithful role models, his everyday heroes. Never before has Gaétan Vaguelsy shown so much tenderness, not without an underlying sense of humor, towards these characters and their joys.

The Naiad series respects external reality, seeking not perfection but poetic reality. The staging of the characters is sustained by pictorial quality and stands out for its rigor. With no desire for photographic effect, Vaguelsy caresses the landscapes with his brushes, which stroll through the branches, glide over the water, pause in the rock, brush against the skin, giving the whole the velvety pleasure of painting. Each painting becomes for us, the viewer, an exploration in which the sensuality of paint guides us through landscapes conceived as ancient scenery.

His paintings capture the luminosity of evanescent moments of sharing, when time seems to stand still. Gaétan Vaguelsy paints the embodiment of his youth, which he brings to the spotlight, to bring it out of its invisibility. Almost sketched in iconic images, these new naiads are contemporary mirrors of Frederic Bazille, Ingres, Cézanne and even David Hockney. Vaguelsy’s reverence for this art form resonates through this homage to the figurative tradition.

A few ironic details punctuate certain paintings, between wink and parody, such as Naïade with watermelon, or Naïade with tagada strawberries. Each painting is animated by a kaleidoscope of pop culture allusions, converging harmoniously in a crescendo of pictorial mastery, testifying to Vaguelsy’s narrative finesse.  The age of possibility and recklessness. Like the naiads, the characters dance and live on the canvas to the rhythm of the passing day and their own existence.

The quality of a painter always results from the way he tells us a story. Here, the mastery of technique, the sensuality of the paint, the humor, all come together to build a strong and a singular pictorial work, in Gaétan’s new series.

Sara Ouhaddou’s projects are based on cultural and craft encounters, mainly in Morocco, but also in Japan, where she spent several months working with master craftsmen, as well as in Italy, the United States and France….  For Sara Ouhaddou, each creation in her artistic career is linked to a person with whom she has worked closely. Her first art teachers were her Moroccan aunts, who were all craftswomen specialising in weaving, sewing or embroidery… It is these encounters, accompanied by a mixture of cultures and transformations, that the artist revisits and showcases, in other words What interests Sara Ouhaddou above all, is this exchange with the craftspeople, working together with the available materials. For the artist, craftsmanship is a way of studying society, people and countries, but it’s also a way of understanding how these objects move around.

When Sara Ouhaddou invites us to look at a work of stained glass, ceramics or weaving, she invites us to observe the story of the people behind it. Her work is based as much on the cultural exchange as it is on the economic one that the artist gradually unravels by producing works in direct contact with the craftspeople. It’s this collaborative approach that she leads, working with the craftspeople to find new tools and new protocols to find solutions that make it possible to go beyond her/their limits, and complement the knowledge and expertise that is often on the verge of extinction.

With globalisation affecting all areas of creation, this work should be seen as an act of resistance whose aim is to create a new creative process. A process that allows Sara Ouhaddou to question her own work at every new exchange, and to reinvent herself. Creating a dialogue with contemporary art and craftsmanship is a way of revealing everything that exists, and everything that is hidden. She puts the meaning of the object on hold to give it multiple meanings. Since 2013, Sara Ouhaddou has been setting up workshops in different regions of Morocco. Concentrating on areas that are most affected by the impoverishment of local culture, she worked with the inhabitants of the village of Ait Souka at an altitude of 1,800 metres in the High Atlas, weaving woolen blankets to protect the mud-built houses from the cold.

She also went to the Ourika valley to make ceramics.  Or in Tetouan, where she spent several weeks with the last young heirs to the art of embroidery (woven unwoven series 2015)… In Japan she worked with ceramics’ masters in Tokyo, and recently in Italy, with wood in Gherdëina. In 2015, Sara Ouhaddou began to combine Amazigh oral poetry with written Arabic translations. By recovering the  Arab-Berber geometry of the language, she created her own font that she elaborates on, depending on her work, like a new universal language. This is how she underlines the singularity of her native language. Language as a means of expressing identity movements.

Whether in the Etudes paper series or in the stained-glass work/installation Il y en a toujours un au-dessus, Il y en a toujours un en dessous , based on texts by the poetess Mririda n’Ait Attik (an Amazigh poetess who lived in the High Atlas in the 19th century), in which, in which she contrasts Amazigh poetry’s insight into the running of the world with the commercial history of glassmaking in the Middle East/North Africa region and the Arabic and Amazigh languages. The 4 windows of the gallery display the work based on the poem by

Mririda N’Ait Attik

Lune, Oh lune!

qui fait et défait les saisons

toi dont la toute puissance donne à la Terre

les nuits qui engendrent la fécondité.

Or the two ceramic works Partition 5 and Partition 6, in which Sara Ouhaddou has reproduced the sounds of percussion played by her uncles to the songs of Mririda n’ait attik. For the wooden bas-relief les mains fertiles, Sara Ouhaddou created a set inspired by the words of Mririda N’ait attik. The sculptures, which depict animals native to Val Gardena, Italy (where the piece was shown in summer 2024) such as bears, snakes, wolves, foxes and eagles, are inspired by the art of zoomorphic pottery, practiced in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco since Neolithic times. Traditionally modeled in clay in Morocco (or wood, in Val Gardena) by women in front of bread ovens or cooking fires, these simple, timeless figures can be used as toys, amulets and protectors for small children. For the two stained-glass diptychs Fantasia, l’art de la cavalerie and Tbourida, l’art de la cavalerie, Sara Ouhadou points out that the glass originally from Andalusia, later replaced by French colonial glass, tells us the political and commercial history of Morocco, as well as the evolution of life in the medinas. It is the history of the world, the geopolitics of craftsmanship, that is the subject of her work. Each workshop is a space for deconstruction, with the artist superimposing history, archaeology, anthropology and economics as a space for encounter and reflection. The two tapestries, Aïn Karma, l’Hiver (Winter) and Aïn Jamâa, l’Été (Summer), represent the winter fig fields of her father’s village, and the summer harvest of her mother’s village. The small sewn ceramics representing village inhabitants, symbolized by the shape of the flowers in the Tétouan embroidery, are reminiscent of the representation of peasants in the prints of Katsushika Hokusai. Like her colleagues before her, such as Yto Barrada and Bouchra Khalili, Sara Ouhaddou is gaining increasing international recognition.

rien n’appartient à personne – tout est question d’échange :

nothing belongs to anyone – it’s all a question of exchange  Sara Ouhaddou

Clémence van Lunen is passionate about technique and the possibilities offered by the material, which she successfully pushes to the limits of balance. The artist engages in a real choreography with the medium, leaving hand or arm prints on the rough or enamelled surfaces of the work, like the remains of a performance.
Transgressing the traditional forms of sculpture, Van Lunen handles her clay with dexterity and technical savoir-faire. As with each of her new series, these compositions defy all academic proportions, thanks to the many areas of raw clay left exposed in the firing process.
Ever since her earliest works, the artist has had a passion for the so-called popular arts, and these old-fashioned, anodyne or functional forms have inspired her to seek out and sublimate that which escapes tradition by enhancing it. In this new series, she succeeds in magnifying the movement of a kingfisher that flies out of a flowerpot or lands on it, or the simple fall of a curtain that opens and closes. She uses sculpture to highlight these gestures, these actions, these everyday objects.

Although form precedes subject in his work, the artist never separates form from texture. One draws the other, and the other can be seen before the first. For Clémence van Lunen, it’s not a question of simply representing reality, but of transcending it.
In this latest part of the Curtains series, and her presentation of the first Kingfishers, Van Lunen continues to reveal the intense pleasure she takes in modelling these voluptuous, exuberant forms.  While retaining her playfulness, but also her freedom as an artist, she brings out subjects and forms where we, as viewers, least expect them.

Clémence Van Lunen’s glazes are also applied with great freedom, contrasting and twirling on and around the ceramics, avoiding correct tones and avoiding the decorative.  But what might seem casual is, in fact, just a great ability to see and understand how a work of art is going to be built up, a work that will continue to change as we look at it. You have to admire the kingfishers, flying through the curtains, emerging from the flowerpots, seeming to give us a mischievous look at the incongruity of their presence in these plantations. You have to look at the multitude of details in the pleats, underwires, cords and stripes to understand and appreciate the enjoyment of creating. Having worked with ceramics as a medium for 20 years, at a time when it was not yet considered a ‘noble’ art by young artists, Clémence van Lunen continues to expand the field of possibilities, much to our delight.

Her monograph, published in 2026 by Skira with texts by Ludovic Recchia, Harry Bellet, and Arie Hartog, establishes her as one of the best contemporary ceramic artists in Europe.

Quentin Marais (born 1988)
Quentin Marais is known for his resolutely ironic and disconcerting approach. His creations, although inspired by design codes, defy precise categorisation. Marais plays with shapes and volumes in such a way as to destabilise the eye and provoke reflection on the very nature of the object. Marais’s pieces, often disconcerting, have a minimalist, uncluttered aesthetic. This intentional ambiguity forces the viewer to question the relationship between form and function, between art and utility.
between form and function, art and utility. Objects that seem familiar at first glance, but whose function escapes all logic, and cease to be identifiable. Each piece thus becomes a visual enigma, which the viewer is invited to decipher without ever getting a definitive answer.