Inauguration of 3 Sculptures

Esplanade, Villejuif-Gustave Roussy metro station, October 14, 2025

The three "Sculptures to Live In" are the result of two years of artistic projects I carried out with the residents of Villejuif. Based on a repertoire of 400 portraits drawn during an artist residency, I designed these three hubs of sociability The cutouts of heads drawn in profile are interlocked to create colorful sculptures. Benches, tables, and a weather vane have been added so that local residents can sit together, exchange books, chat, or play chess.

Instagram content Commission

MIXED MESSAGES - French-German Cultural Center, Karlsruhe

A series of 10-frame stories on French current affairs (in French).

INSTALLATION OF THE GRAND PARADE

Pôle social départemental du Havre (76), 1% public art project, competition won in December 2023, installed in November 2024

The public art project for the building that brings together the region’s social services needed to be focused on people. This is why I created a Grand Parade of joyful figures to dance across the huge entrance hall. Made in quality woods to match the materials used in the building, these 17 characters incarnate resilience in the face of adversity and enchant the daily lives of its visitors. Ten wall pieces are spread throughout the upper floors

LATEST BOOKLET

Post Office Squat

The old post office below the municipal art school in Villejuif has been closed for years. Until renovations begin in April 2025, I will be using it as an experimental playground.

NUIT BLANCHE, 2024

ARCHIPELAGO OF PORTRAITS

1 June 2024, 8pm - 1am

école maternelle Pasteur

69 rue Pasteur

Villejuif 94100

For the White Night event, Archipelago of Portraits transforms a repertoire of 400 portraits of Villejuif residents into over thirty sculptures made of painted laser-cut wood. The play of positive and negative shapes is accentuated by the lighting. Installed in a school gymnasium, small sculptures surround a few large ones (up to 250 cm high), scattered like islands in an archipelago.

NEW PUBLICATION

Delivered in June 2024 for distribution at the Nuit blanche event, the book “Villejuif from A to Z” documents work done during the “Under Construction” artist residency at the Elsa Triolet library in Villejuif in 2023.

Financed by the city of Villejuif

Published by friville éditions

Text by Marjolaine Lévy

23 x 17 cm, 192 pages

500 copies

Paper: Munken print white 1.5, 115 g

FLOOD ABACUS

Floods in Courcelle-sur-Seine

Installed in 2021 to measure floods and commmunicate on their potential danger, the Flood Abacus was shown to work as planned during a "blue level" flood in March 2024.

Photo: Pauline Bachelet

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Médiathèque Elsa Triolet, Villejuif

From 26 September to 22 December 2023

This ever-changing portrait of the city of Villejuif was made with salvaged materials. I worked daily on a table in the library in dialogue with residents. Every Saturday, I drew visitors' portraits in profile. This repertoire of silhouettes was hybridised with construction site pictograms (scaffolding, cranes, etc). Over 400 portraits were drawn, becoming the starting point for all the works made.

EMPTY BOOKCASE COMMISSION

Delivered August 2023

six paintings for a Paris apartment

acrylic on linen

35 x 27 cm

NUIT BLANCHE, 2023

LOST CIVILIZATION

Place Oscar Niemeyer

Métro Villejuif - Léo-Lagrange

Saturday June 3, 2023

6pm – 12.30am

The installation is based on a fictional archeological dig that revealed a lost civilization. 35 one-eyed portraits are the only surviving relics of a society that failed to adapt to its era. The heads are presented on recycled road signs and laid on the ground, as if marking the spot where each artifact was found.

POSTER CAMPAIGN

in the streets of Karlsruhe

Stiftung CCFA Karlsruhe 

March 21 - April 4 2023 

Bicycle tour of sites on March 22  

Created for the French language week (Semaine de la francophonie) the project Collections Francophones contributes to the current debate on the return of art treasures of colonial origin in our museums. The posters represent standard museum artifacts, some of them problematic, on display in Canada, Switzerland, Belgium and France. Morocco, a former French "protectorate", is shown as a counterpoint to the Western hegemonic narrative. Made especially for Karlsruhe, these posters are based on the projects "Museums of the World" (2010 - 2015) and "Disturbing Specimens" (ongoing). The presentation at the CCFA was followed by a bike tour of some of the sites.

FRAC PICARDIE

PING-PONG, 2/12 - 4/12/2022

Participation in Ping-Pong, the mini micro-publishing fair. Round table on Sunday December 4th at 4pm. With Eric Le Brun from Light Motiv Editions and Quentin Pruvost, photographer recently published by Light Motiv, as well as Dominique de Bier from Friville Editions and Heidi Wood to present Tour du monde en transition published in 2022 by Friville Editions. Chaired by Anne Lacoste and Pascal Neveux

GROUP SHOW "ET VLAN"

Galerie Haut du Pavé, Paris September 2 - 4, 2022 Organized by friville éditions Including signature of the book "Tour du monde en transition" With Charlotte Puertas, Agathe Schneider, Thomas Maestro, Baptiste Roux

NEW BOOK

Touring a World in Transition, 2022

The artist book Tour du monde en transition has arrived. It covers 10 years of work reconfigured in light of my narrative turn. Chapters documenting projects alternate with micro-narratives made up of various elements. It is divided into three sections: contemporary experience, museums and heritage and the urban environment.

23 x 17 cm, 256 pages

texts by Julie Crenn and Heidi Wood

éditions friville

edition of 500

NFT COLLECTION

E-CHIMERAS

The collection E-chimeras has been launched on the objkt.com platform. The 12 NFTs are hybrids born of the world of online shopping. Click on the website link to consult.

"PICTOGRAMS AND ANECDOTES" LECTURE

25/11/21, MUSÉE DES BEAUX-ARTS, ROUEN

An invitation by Tania Vladova to accompany the exhibition Display Home at the Hus – ESADHaR.

For a long time, my work was about reducing things to their essence: I decant the spirit of down-at-heel places into pictograms. Then I conduct pseudo tourist campaigns to promote these unlikely destinations. One day, I asked myself about the ideological implications of my work and suddenly, it became urgent to rethink the whole undertaking.   This lecture includes both pictures and stories to describe an ongoing metamorphosis.

Display Home

ESDAHaR, ROUEN, 18/10-15/12/2021

An invitation by the art school in Rouen to exhibit in their house-shaped exhibition module in the entrance hall revived my interest in the failed utopia of collective social housing. On the inner walls, proliferations of colored squares evoke the scrambling of the modernist grid practiced by contemporary architects. On an outer wall, photocopies using text, simulations of interiors made with the Ikea design tool and flower collages form a tale of the difference between planed and lived reality.

SCULPTURE INSTALLED

FLOOD ABACUS, 2021

The sculpture, installed in a flood zone in Courcelles sur Seine in late August 2021, was designed to measure the rising waters and playfully inform the general public of their dangers.   Commissioned by AREAS, financed by The Seine Eure Agglo, the Ministry of Culture and private sponsors.

ACQUISITION

FRAC PAYS DE LA LOIRE, 2021

The FRAC Pays de la Loire has acquired the 12 Journals created in 2020. Ceded on a non-exclusive basis, in the form of pdf files and color photocopy fanzines, the FRAC will be able to recompose the material to make new stories.

GROUP EXHIBITION "X"

FRAC PAYS DE LA LOIRE, 2021 - 22

This exhibition, curated by Claude Closky, was to celebrate the reopening of the FRAC after a year of renovations. The works, contained in the collection or borrowed, "all have in common that they look at the unfolding of daily life, at the impact of time on work, or that they adopt a specific temporality in the way they are exhibited" (CC).

Exhibition runs until January 2 2022.

OF INEXACT SCIENCE

PUBLIC ART PROPOSAL, 2021

The proposal for the science and technology campus of Lyon University is a six-part comic strip. Born of consultations with experts in several fields (engineering, sociology, comparative literature, graphic design), it adopts what appears to be the language of science but is in fact transdisciplinary. From a distance, with its figures and pseudo-formula, it seems to embody the scientific spirit. If we look at its narrative content, the scenario is absurd.

(Proposal not accepted).

NEW PUBLIC ART PROJECT

Collège Aretha Franklin, Drancy

53 enamel panels grouped into 12 polyptychs decorate the school's corridors. 8 works designed by the students using the coats of arms they created during workshops earlier in the year are hung in the staircase.

Competition won in November 2019.

Project delivered July 2020.

KONTAKT #46

09/2020

Proposal for the monthly drawing magazine Kontakt, published by Alex Chevalier. Electronic mail-out September 30 2020.

ORACLE

07/2020, On-line card game

This interactive, electronic card game, created during the first Covid-19 lock-down, assumed that the crisis would spark a return to superstition. It works with a set of 400 cards, mostly using imagery pulled off the Internet, and as many fortune cookie-type prophecies. Viral animations spring out of nowhere. The pandemic-themed texts, images and animations are at the service of old divination techniques. The cards are drawn automatically but you can also intervene, following obscure and changing rules, to try and influence what the Oracle says.

ALLONS VOIR

PAYS FORT

August 2 - September 27 2020 

My contribution to this group exhibition in the pyramid-shaped barns of the Pays Fort region was inspired by the local tradition of witchcraft. I adopted its assumption that answers to problems can be found in a parallel realm and certain rituals give access to it. Groups of construction signage inscribed with pictographic representations of rural life and QR codes were spread among the three sites. They marked the entry points to underground content: the card game Oracle and four electronic flip books (Rural Flip 1 – 4).

Curator: Lucile Encrevé

Organizers: Singularités.

OÙ EST LA DIFFÉRENCE ?

CAC MEYMAC

July 4 to October 11 2020   This group exhibition takes gender as its theme, pairing male and female artists with thematic or formal similarities. My ORACLE electronic card game and wall paintings depicting the mutation of the Covid-19 virus dialogue with Olivier Garraud's disident pseudo press cartoons. Our shared interest in mapping current affairs, the ironic use of text and a taste for high impact graphics motivated this "arranged mariage."

Curators: Caroline Bissière & Jean-Paul Blanchet

installation of public art project

Collège Jean Monnet, Vertou

Titled Hidden Corners of Europe, the project consists of 21 large scale enamel panels hung in the entrance hall, 18 works created by students during workshops and two explanatory publications.

Delivered March 15 2019.

BUSWAY, NANTES

Commission from Voyage à Nantes to decorate a 22 meter long articulated bus alongside 21 other artists including Christophe Cuzin, Karina Bisch, Nicolas Chardon… The visual is from the repertoire Cosmic, used in three colors with different scales and jumps in continuity.

Delivered September 2019

NEW PUBLIC ART PROJECT

Flood Abacus, Courcelles-sur-Seine

The project Seine de crues, put forward by the non-profit Areas, aimed to communicate about the dangers of flooding along the Seine. The “Flood Abacus” chosen for the site at Courcelles-sur-Seine moves with the elements. The spinning house on top indicates wind speed and direction. The colored buoys, lined up at 2 meters above ground level, are pushed upwards by floodwaters. The mast, with its 20cm stripes, allows people to calculate the water level from a safe distance up on the bridge.

NEW ARTIST BOOKS

Downloadable pdf files

Two new artist books present drawings of essentially African sculptures exhibited at the Pavillon des Sessions at the Louvre. The “imperial drawings” done with the right hand embody the certainty that science once enjoyed. The “postcolonial” drawings, done with the left hand, are less sure of themselves. They represent a renewed approach to these problematic museum pieces.

NEW ARTIST BOOK

Cartographie d'une année sans voyages

From September 2017 – May 2018, I completed the 2^nd year of a Masters program in the Contemporary Art Department of Université Paris 8. Unable to travel during this time of intellectual awakening and thus cut off from my usual subject matter, I decided to map my everyday life. This “mapping of a year without travel” combines a range of visuals, found texts, anecdotes and administrative correspondence generated by my naturalization as a French citizen. 74 pages, 14,85 x 21 cm. In French (mostly).

NEW ESSAY

Scientific Committee for Cultural Rebalancing

The result of a studious summer, this essay looks back on my project Museums of the World (2009 – 2015). This inventory of objects (but not artworks) contained in museums in 35 cities worldwide is reevaluated in light of debates that have rocked ethnographic museums over the last few decades. The essay contains illustrations and anecdotal detours relevant to the issues. 20 pages. In French.

BOAA

Biennale of Australian Art (Ballarat)

The exhibition Off the Map at the Post Office Gallery is a continuation of my interest in taking supposedly unappealing urban zones as the subjects of tourism campaigns. Based on a decade of traveling to ex-Soviet outposts, post-industrial regions and unloved neighborhoods full of social housing, this is a call to reconsider where you’d like to spend your holidays. My visitors’ center for neglected destinations brings together wall paintings, photographs and travel anecdotes.