Mémoire Urbaine et Collective

I paint and sculpt the sounds of Paris.

A pianist turned painter and sculptor, I have long worked in two passages: an idea heard as harmony, harmony turned into colour. What is new here is where the chain begins. Not a score, not a piece I already know — the city itself.

The sound of the city reaches me first. I then work it to draw out the harmony, and sometimes the rhythm. The métro finds a key, a stairwell an interval, a crowd its own density of chords — and only then do the colour, or the form, come. Music is not the subject of the work; it is the road Paris takes to get there.

I am at the beginning of this. The rule that governs the first passage is still forming under my hands — I am writing it as I paint. That is exactly why these canvases interest me: I do not entirely know yet what they obey.

Artist Statement

A musical note does not last. It sounds, it fades. What remains is not the note but what it left in the body of the one who heard it.

That is what I look for in a city. Not its façades, but the residue it deposits — a rhythm picked up in a stairwell, a colour that a chord makes audible, a silence between two passing trains. I work that residue in acrylic, in watercolour, in clay, until the transposition holds on its own.

The idea does not belong to the medium it was born in. It can change register and survive. That passage is the whole of my practice. Here, for the first time, it begins from recordings of the city's own sounds.

Logistics

Dates: 28 August – 8 September 2026

Opening reception: Sunday 30 August 2026, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Opening Hours: Every day, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. until 31 August, then 11 a.m. to 7.30 p.m. from 1 to 8 September

Venue: L'Orangerie du Sénat, Jardin du Luxembourg, 15 rue de Vaugirard, 75291 Paris Cedex 06

Access: Place Edmond Rostand, place André Honnorat, rue Guynemer or rue de Vaugirard

Admission: Free

Also at the Orangerie: Les couleurs de la mer by Marye Jalabert and Empreintes-Enveloppes, Métamorphoses by Guillaume Werle — two separate exhibitions over the same period.

Collective: memoire-urbaine-et-collective.org

Venue listing: jardin.senat.fr