B-Side: Paul Pouvreau

B-Side is a project located in the window of the rue de Crussol. On the edge of our programme, the gallery invites an artist with a remarkable body of work to create a dialogue with our current exhibition.

Paul Pouvreau

Untitled, 2025
Inkjet pigment print on paper
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
80 x 120 cm

In the darkness of a neutral background, a simple plastic bag stands upright. Crumpled, dented, it seems to hold itself alone, without support, like a body without a skeleton or a voice without a story. And yet, it grips us — it is matter for thought.

This photograph, exhibited here in a space that has established itself as a privileged place for artistic voices from African diasporas or geographic margins, takes on a particular resonance; for if the object here is silent, it is not empty. The plastic bag is one of the most globalized objects of the contemporary world. It is found in markets, alleyways, ports, and peripheries. It circulates, sometimes without destination. It contains, it carries, it clutters. At times it becomes the only suitcase of a journey, an exile, an informal trade, a precarious life.

In this context, this work does not simply stand alongside the narratives conveyed by the artists usually shown here. It insinuates itself. It unsettles, through its anxious stillness, its apparent neutrality, any overly expected reading of objects and signs. It does not speak directly of migration, coloniality, displacement — but it lets them emerge, in negative. This bag becomes a kind of spectral presence: that of what has been exploited, displaced, abandoned.

This is not an ironic or conceptual gesture. It is a gesture of attention. Paul Pouvreau does not seek to speak in place of other narratives; he proposes a form, a listening through the image, a discreet shifting of the focus.