O des Origines — Le Centre Tignous d'Art Contemporain — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 12 days: May 7 → July 18, 2026

A group exhibition curated by Olivier Peyronnet and Emmanuel Rivière brings together Clément Borderie, Emilie Lesvignes, Ha My Nguyen, Laurence Nicola, Olivier Peyronnet, Philippe Richard and Emmanuel Rivière.

Titled O des Origines, the show explores the fertile dialogue between contemporary artistic practice and prehistoric imagination, taking the cave as both the birthplace of art and a foundational space of human experience.

Since the late 19th century, prehistory has offered artists and researchers a shared field for reconsidering the earliest forms of visual expression. The cave—inhabited, marked and transformed over millennia—emerges as a crucial site for thinking about the origins of art and its enduring echoes. In O des Origines, it becomes not merely a subject but a method: a place of depth, imprint, matter and memory.

Laurence Nicola, exposition O des Origines, Centre Tignous d’Art Contemporain, Montreuil, 2026 Courtesy de l’artiste © DR

Working collectively around the imagery of caves and parietal art, the artists develop a vocabulary shaped by subterranean worlds. Their works draw on the textures, gestures and atmospheres of these environments, extending them into contemporary forms that move between inheritance and invention. The exhibition unfolds as a layered space where ancient traces resonate with present-day experimentation.

Presented at the Centre Tignous d’Art Contemporain in Montreuil, the exhibition enters into dialogue with the Grande Grotte of Arcy-sur-Cure, a site successively occupied by Neanderthals and Homo sapiens and home to paintings dating back roughly 28,000 years. The pairing brings two spaces into conversation: the physical depth of the cave and the open architecture of the art centre. Together, they invite a reconsideration of origins not as distant history but as an active, generative force. Art becomes a passage between memory and invention, offering a sensory encounter with deep time—where a remote past meets a living present.

By staging a tension between surface and depth, the works unsettle habitual modes of looking and encourage immersive perception. They also return attention to the body in the act of creation, echoing humanity’s earliest gestures. In doing so, the exhibition suggests a continuity between ancestral practices and contemporary artistic languages. Origin, here, is not a fixed point but an ongoing movement—something that continues to unfold.