Tendres Débris — Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois
Joyful, vibrant, and of the highest calibre, the exhibition Tendres Débris brings together at Galerie G-P & N Vallois artists from different generations and horizons around rejection and recovery—around what no longer has a place in a systematised consumer society.
Inseparable from our modern condition, the question of exclusion, residue, and obsolescence becomes, for these artists, material for reinvention: a reinterpretation of use that diverts the object from its “sacred” and original functionality. For before being a movement, the driving force is a form—one that art knows how to perceive as a shift in its mental landscape and to appropriate, like the works presented here (all of them compelling), through a poetic détournement that magnetises it to its own imagination.
Forms here converge through their singularities, sounding the death knell of the reproducibility that once defined them: hybrid and fantastic creatures are born (Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely); pure abstractions emerge, inhabited by a mysticism that is anything but abstract (Moffat Takadiwa); cosmic voids take shape through the familiarity of signs (Jacques Villeglé, Raymond Hains, François Dufrêne); an organic form of life self-generates, allowing its original nature to reclaim its rights (Henrique Oliveira); a theatre of hallucinatory narrative inventions is staged (the toys re-enacted by Tomi Ungerer); romantic-biographical allegories are invented (Ryan Gander’s fabric self); transcendental revelations appear at the heart of the city (Perrine Guyonnet); our inner landscape is reconfigured, combining the exoticism of the image with domesticity (Pilar Albarracín); the common is ennobled, becoming courtly attire (Prince Toffa’s “imperial” dress)… A joyful, kaleidoscopic litany of actions born of reaction, of events born of inertia, populating a parcours resolutely devoted to surprise and, in its diversity, to formidable ambition.
Truculent and romantic, the works above all convey a way of inhabiting the world—one that recognises its infinite reserve of invention—unfolding an unexpected wealth of powerful reflections. And finally asserting that taking the course of the world against the grain may be the only way to reveal that politics and poetics are two sides of the same reverse.
Tendres Débris — Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, from January 16th to March 07th 2026, 33-36 rue de Seine, 75006 Paris
