Surface
22.05-19.06

The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Pal Project, Romero Paprocki, Galerie ETC and Galerie Paradis.
Grand Tour is located 123, rue de Turenne, Paris 3 and open from Monday to Friday from 11am to 5pm.

Lina Ben Rejeb
Marion Flament
Matisse Mesnil
Emmanuelle Leblanc
Lisa Ouakil
Ugo Sébastião
Lou Ros
Stan Van Steendam
Max Wechsler

Towards a New Materiality of the Image.

At a time when painting seems to have said it all, a new generation of artists breathes fresh life into the medium by radically shifting its foundations. Heirs to the experiments of Supports/Surfaces and Arte Povera, yet equally shaped by the thought of Georges Didi-Huberman, Jacques Rancière, and Gilles Deleuze, they revisit the history of the pictorial surface to offer a broader, more sensitive, and contemporary reading.

This “Surface Generation,” embodied by Matisse Mesnil, Marion Flament, Lou Ros, Stan Van Steendam, Ugo Sébastião, Lisa Ouakil, Lina Ben Rejeb, and Emmanuelle Leblanc, doesn’t merely question what we see—but more crucially, how we see. Their work reflects a conception of the visible as material in flux. It is no longer about representation, but about appearance—about rendering the image perceptible in its sensory and perceptual dimensions.

Memory, both individual and collective, becomes a material in its own right: a non-linear memory composed of overlapping layers, erasures, traces, and resurgences. For Matisse Mesnil, it lies at the core of his practice: his works appear as palimpsests, where each gesture covers without ever fully erasing. Lou Ros approaches painting as one might unearth a memory—through strata, like a figure surfacing from the depths of a dream…

In Marion Flament’s work, light reactivates buried forms, mental images, and sensory memories of domestic spaces. Ugo Sébastião inscribes volume into the memory of gesture: his paintings explore how the body remembers, how it archives movements, pressures, and tensions. Lisa Ouakil constructs a fragmentary kind of painting, where each form seems to emerge from a forgotten alphabet or a story waiting to be reconstructed. Emmanuelle Leblanc, for her part, explores the memory of silence—a muted, tenuous painting that invites the eye to slow down, to remember how to see.

Stan Van Steendam gives form to a geological memory: his surfaces evoke the strata of time, the sedimented layers of our experience of the world. Lina Ben Rejeb, through a meditative and minimalist approach, explores a memory of emptiness, of purity—what remains when everything has been stripped away.

Echoing this emerging generation, Max Wechsler—a well-established figure on the French scene—unfolds a rigorously conceptual body of work where text and material intertwine.

This is not a manifesto. This exhibition is a shifting territory, a friction zone between disciplines, an experimental space in which the image is reconfigured—not as icon-image, but as material-image. A kind of painting where memory is at work: memory of gesture, memory of form, memory of disappearance.

– Manon Canto