The Nerve — Galerie Allen
At Galerie Allen, the exhibition The Nerve, conceived by the artist Tarek Lakhrissi, plays with fullness and emptiness with a gratifying depth. Behind the striking accumulation of signs and images, his own work remains in the background, choosing instead to construct a framework of thought in negative form, stripped of his personal works yet filled with his life.
Like the body beneath the sheet of the ghost by Rondinone that confronts us at the threshold, presences feed on absence to create the substance of a fabric that binds them. This takes the form of a sensitive reading of the plastic productions of artists who nourish him, based on a concept that is both physical and symbolic: the nerve as a zone of tension, circulation, and alertness. A reading that tends toward rereading, so much does the text written by Lakhrissi, full of emotion and intimacy, inhabit the gaze, and so much do the words, his own as well as those of the works, accumulate to sketch polysemic facets of a fragmented, even radiant, narrative in which the gathering abandons the formalization of a concept in order to oppose it with a constellation of affects, the driving forces of a central idea.
In the compact space of the gallery, the exhibition unfolds an energy and a constant movement across the walls. Each work acts as a magnetic pole, drawing the eye in or redirecting it toward its surroundings, projecting a continual crossing between vulnerability captured by the image, displayed desire, and critical lucidity. Around the ghostly figure by Ugo Rondinone, which seems to suspend time within a silent interiority, unfold presences that are far more expressive, sometimes abrasive, yet always inhabited.
This oscillation between restraint and intensity traces the sinusoidal rhythm of the whole and shifts attention from one peak to another, reflecting the excitement of encounters and the fruitfulness of artistic exchanges in which Tarek Lakhrissi assumes the position of intermediary. He turns his own crisis with the world into a prism through which to read the works of others. The project thus says much about the collective scope of contemporary creation, about its capacity to integrate otherness and relationship as the very conditions of meaning. The practices of Valentin Ranger, Jasmine Gregory, Neila Czermak Ichti, Ndaje Kouagou, Soufiane Ababri and historical painter Jean Boullet but also find common ground for their singularities, where questions of legitimacy, identity, value, and resistance are replayed.
The exhibition space becomes a surface of passage rather than a closed entity, a place where forces, desires, and contradictory narratives circulate. Far from soothing formal tensions, The Nerve keeps them active, as a condition of survival and creation.
In the face of collapse, Lakhrissi’s exhibition, by taking the side of the other, proposes a possible reconstruction, one that makes instability and plural identity the driving force of an artistic gesture that operates as a sensitive scaffolding for the invention of a shared gaze.
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The Nerve — curated by Tarek Lakhrissi — Soufiane Ababri, Jean Boullet, Neïla Czermak Ichti, Jasmine Gregory, Ndayé Kouagou, Valentin Ranger, Ugo Rondinone, 12th December, 2025 — 17th January, 2026 — Galerie Allen, 6 passage Sainte-Avoye, 75003 Paris — Tuesday — Friday, 11h — 18h, Saturday, 11h — 19h.
