EXHIBITION “Tendres débris” – Galerie VALLOIS, until March 7, 2026

This “poetic recycling of reality”, which lies at the heart of the New Realists’ approach, also resonates in the work of several of their American contemporaries.
In the hands of George Herms, discarded fragments become relics: abandoned objects rescued from oblivion and restored to a sense of desirability.
Louise Nevelson, for her part, gathers modest found pieces of wood and assembles them into sensitive structures, where shadow and silence seem to take shape.

Closer to our own time, Henrique Oliveira transforms the humble wood of tapumes salvaged from Brazilian favelas into vibrant sculptural paintings, whose colour and tension appear to retain the memory of the places from which they came.
Martin Kersels breathes a second, joyful and offbeat life into old objects, furniture, and reclaimed wood, as if abandonment itself already contained the promise of renewal.

In a different register, Julien Berthier celebrates reality through imitation: he reproduces, in painted aluminium, the exact forms created by bulky waste left on the streets of Paris, then places them on solid wooden plinths, granting them the definitive status of artworks.
Meanwhile, Emmanuel Van der Elst, a recent graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, constructs imposing yet precarious architectures by assembling—without fixing them—offcuts of exhibition walls and office furniture, held together in a fragile balance.

Another sovereign form of waste, produced, consumed, and discarded on a massive scale, plastic finally runs through the exhibition: it gently pollutes it, taking on sometimes deceptive forms, reminding us that even the most banal refuse can become a source of disturbance, beauty, or questioning.