Art Paris 2025

For this edition, we will present the first double-sided tapestry created specifically by Lionel Sabatté for Art Paris. Long fascinated by the immediacy of Paleolithic cave art, Lionel Sabatté has engaged with this technique by seeking to deconstruct it. Refusing to view tapestry as a mere mechanical reproduction of a motif through the crossing of wool and paper threads, Sabatté enriches the surface of the fabric with acrylic-painted figures, marks made using simple dried petroleum patties collected from beaches, and fishing-net threads tied into knots resembling fantastical bestiaries. The original motif seems absorbed and overlaid by multiple layers from which animal figures emerge, intertwine, and reappear differently on the other side of the tapestry. Visible from both sides and suspended like a sculpture, the work offers on each face a distinct composition, even as these figurative projections evoke the drawings found on Paleolithic cave walls.

Clément Bagot produces drawings of exceptional precision that evoke in the viewer memories of fleeting images—reproductions of the infinitely small, views from outer space, or imagined territories resembling city maps. Deeply influenced by the codes of cartography, the graphic language of science fiction comics (such as those by Mœbius), scientific imagery of the microcosm, and the line work of 18th-century engraving, the artist develops pareidolic configurations in which each image unfolds through almost antinomic layers of figuration, with shifts in scale and ambiguous relationships to reality. Like few artists, he offers work that invites reverie and imaginary wandering through the folds of the image. This presentation is complemented by a selection of sculptures, another field of exploration that extends these questions through structures evoking both future cities and robotic beings in search of embodiment.

After several months of work, Javier Pérez presents a new series composed of various triptychs that play on the ambiguities between mechanical image and painted image. In this movement between several states of representation, Pérez imagines a crossing between two registers of the image: its mechanical form and its incarnation through the artist’s hand. Created from photographs of wooded areas at twilight, each triptych evokes a disturbance—our contemporary perception of reality. While the first work reproduces the photographic image, the second and third are covered with dozens of gradually applied ink layers acting as filters. From this subtle interplay between the materiality of the layers and the information of the image emerges a shift that transforms a bucolic landscape into a radical inquiry into a form of transcendence. In this way, Javier Pérez demonstrates that the artist’s subconscious always succeeds in surpassing the tangible reality offered by technique, leading the viewer toward the shores of pure imagination.

In recent months, Claire Trotignon has initiated a reversal of the guiding principles of her collages. The emergence of blue backgrounds now corresponds to the prominence of classical architectural elements, which have become the central motif of her compositions. While her works intertwine multiple temporalities, the notion of ruins and the ecological dereliction of our world, they primarily stand as critical propositions about our present and our inability to imagine a relationship with the world not burdened by heavy materiality. By reaffirming a certain sense of monumentality, Claire Trotignon’s work demonstrates that it remains possible to re-enchant the signs of history.

The long history of photography has always been fascinated with recording transient phenomena and the fluctuations of time suddenly captured through the magic of photographic registration. Gilles Pourtier has focused on the recurring motif of the cloud. Far from illustrating the theories of nephology (the science of clouds), he conceives of the cloud as a reservoir of questions about the very nature of photography. While Alfred Stieglitz’s famous Equivalents (1925) sought to express his emotions in the face of the “chaos of the world,” Gilles Pourtier instead aims to turn clouds into a repository of forms disconnected from their reference. For this reason, he uses the early process of solarization (once popularized by Man Ray), producing images in which matter becomes the ghost of our emotions.