franckDavid – Échange corps contre image[s]

Galerie 8+4 is delighted to present franckDavid’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, from 28 November 2026 to 16 January 2027. Entitled Échange corps contre image[s] (Body in Exchange for Image[s]), this gathering of works, situations and propositions can be understood as an attempt to enter into complicity with Robert Filliou’s famous statement: “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.” Yet whereas Filliou discerned unusual configurations within everyday existence, franckDavid acknowledges a crisis: that of the images and bodies that world events relentlessly impose upon us.

As a seemingly hallucinatory response, he presents for the first time an extensive comic book (Vielleicht/ peut-être/..), the outcome of several years of reflection. Initially composed of stills from films and television series that he collects and then transcribes into drawings using carbon paper, the book, published in an edition of 500 copies, becomes the counterpart to a series of works displayed on the wall and gathered in a portfolio. The interplay between the comic book and its originals thus sets in motion a process that opens onto a surprising narrative complexity. It falls to visitors to discern, amid the visual contradictions of this exploration of contemporary archetypes, the threads of a reflection on the absent body, seemingly absorbed by its surroundings. A second book, Des Parenthèses mises bout à bout, les unes derrière les autres, qui forment l’index en pointe (Parentheses Placed End to End, One After Another, Forming a Pointed Index Finger), also presented for the first time, brings together parenthetical passages the artist encounters and collects in his reading. These asides form a collection of literary fragments drawn from many different contexts and periods, suddenly transformed into a stylistic labyrinth—a kind of protolanguage, sketching a portrait in negative space of a humanity without identity.

Presented in counterpoint are Éclipse domestique and Electric candle, two works whose domestic vocabulary introduces an expanded relationship to the duration of the exhibition. Through their capacity to question what asserts itself as a presence or, conversely, as a form of invisibility, these two objects of ambiguous status—one revealing a phosphorescent light, the other presenting the negative form of the heat emitted by a light bulb within a block of wax—inevitably evoke still life. In a sense, both works reject any notion of transcendence in the artistic gesture, still so prevalent in contemporary discourse, with its romantic exaltation of the artist as genius, its celebration of technique, and so on. Within the gallery space, both also open onto other works that should be understood as clues to a work in progress: a process of montage that, in the very act of its making, calls the viewer-visitor’s expectations into question. With pointure, a concrete block in which two men’s leather boots are embedded, the ghostly body becomes an image to be activated through a back-and-forth between gangster films—with their executions at sea, bodies weighed down by concrete around their feet—and the harsh reality of contemporary migration around the Mediterranean.

Ultimately, this exhibition might amount to a compilation of doubts: franckDavid’s works are never dated, nor do they openly reveal the logic behind their emergence. For him, exhibiting therefore means neither presenting a response to the immediate moment nor setting out a factual chronology. On the contrary, something that has recently emerged can acquire a formidable critical relevance when juxtaposed with an earlier work or gesture that, in other circumstances, carried a different meaning. For franckDavid, every exhibition reasserts a process of montage, of joins and sutures between different situations or moments in time. The exhibition thus becomes a temporary, constantly evolving crystallisation of a given context.

Échange corps contre image[s] has no fixed form and proclaims no grand truths. As the days and hours pass, the arrangement of the interventions continually shifts, their successive layers forming so many chapters of the exhibition. One such chapter is the film Trouvé-Perdu, screened at regular intervals in the gallery’s basement, whose twilight images suggest a possible end to all relations with the other.