Paréidolie 2025

For this edition of Paréidolie, Galerie 8 + 4 has chosen to highlight the master of neo-manga, Yûichi Yokoyama (born in 1967 in Miyazaki, Japan). Considered one of the most important contemporary artists working at the crossroads of contemporary art and comics, he has developed an outstanding body of work since the 1990s, situated between figuration and abstraction. For Paréidolie, an exceptional selection of drawings and preparatory sketches from his latest books (Travel, Plazza, Garden, Baby-Boom) is presented. His restrained line acquires an even more striking energy in these works, created on a wide variety of paper types (recycled paper, drafts, advertisements, etc.), where he plays with printed characters as if they were sounds, refining his compositions and storyboards.

Regularly exhibited in major Japanese and Anglo-Saxon museums as well as at the Palais de Tokyo (2018), his works were also featured at the closing of the major exhibition on comics presented by the Centre Pompidou in 2024. Sometimes enhanced with colour or collage, these pencil works crystallise in a single form both the pop effervescence of contemporary culture and the radical vision of an artist seeking purity and reduction in his narratives.

For the second consecutive year, we are also presenting the work of Clément Bagot, who explores in his own way a meticulous approach in which drawing becomes detail, leading the eye to question scale—hesitating between macrocosm and microcosm, views from outer space or imagined territories resembling city maps. The new series exhibited for Paréidolie marks a spectacular shift with the reintroduction of figuration, yet a pareidolic figuration in which images unfold through almost antinomic layers, with fractured scales and ambiguous relationships to reality, creating a mise en abyme effect. The human presence, appearing in the form of robots, seems to reaffirm that this art also draws from the fantastical worlds of comics and science fiction.

For this edition of Paréidolie, we will also present the new series “Off-Screen” by the Sœurs Chevalme, who on this occasion offer drawings that expand the range of historical image sources underlying their work. Their approach explores the relationship Western culture has had—and continues to have—with the rest of the world, addressing the unspoken legacy of colonialism, investigating underground cultures within the communities they encounter, and examining the historical ruptures that shaped the 20th century. Their work continuously intertwines scientific inquiry with a reflection on the emergence of art in the contemporary world.

Kim N Kosiahn, participating in Paréidolie for the first time, uses ink to capture the lingering impressions of experiences and emotions from childhood in Vietnam, a country deeply affected by war. Far from attempting to reproduce reality, these delicate small-format works give memories an ethereal and poetic form.

Also exhibiting for the first time at Paréidolie is Nicolas Aïello, an artist of time and handwritten trace as testimony of a relationship with writing, whose work is collected by major French institutions (Centre Georges Pompidou, National Library of France, among others). In his work, interwoven lines form something like geological layers that overlap, drawing the gaze toward distant lands and other temporalities. Often conceived as distant transpositions of documents, photographs, and the work of historians such as Shapiro or Warburg which he collects, these drawings—also to be seen as handwritten attempts at writing—disrupt any fixed or stable reading.