From 7 December 2023 to 12 January 2024
Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, 27 rue de Seine, Paris 6e
Opening on Thursday 7 December 2023, 6 to 10 pm
Hôtel Moderne will be Mr Djub’s third solo show at the Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles. Mr Djub is also known as Djubaka, music programmer and columnist on France Inter. For this exhibition he will present for the first time his paper theatre: scalpelled, cut out and glued from nineteenth-century printed paper. On this occasion Éditions Venus d’ailleurs will publish a limited-edition book of this miniature theatre.
“Time is elastic. The sources of my collages are drawings and engravings from the golden age of the illustrated and popular press, newspapers published between 1860 and 1900, a world straddling the Second Empire, the beginnings of the Third Republic and the first steps of the Belle Époque. My new playground for this exhibition centres on the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century. We are in Paris, a world city opening up to every modernity. While Paname already has more than two million inhabitants, the 1878 World’s Fair will see sixteen million pilgrims file past, hungry for modernity and dreams. Hotels, luxurious or humble, become dens of stories; Paris undergoes an upheaval of stone and soul; movement is perpetual. Hôtel moderne tells the secrets and lies of characters who, between two destinations, set down their bags in an iconoclastic, heterogeneous, disparate and monstrously welcoming city. Here, night never ends. For a time the upper bourgeoisie rubs shoulders with petty crooks, artists of the stage and the easel swarm, the art movements of the Zutistes, the Hydropathes and the Arts Incohérents lead the dance and offer a real counterculture. Secret societies recruit wholesale. The wonders and oddities of nature take to the stage and fill the halls. Paris is a magnet for re-enchantment. The fifty collages of Hôtel moderne were conceived in the spirit of an exquisite corpse crossed with Oulipo. The constraint of the printed images and the story that brings them forth push towards encounter. Each collage harbours a scrap of lie or a hidden truth. It was also in this state of mind, and without necessarily meaning to, that the draughtsmen and engravers from whom I borrow and remix images worked. Their role was to tell of the extraordinary without ever having seen it, a testimony by proxy. Others had witnessed the dramas they had to recount and sketch. Unlike journalists, their desire to inform was not necessarily meant to be truthful or precise. Their space was that of extravagance, their mission to give realism to the unknown. This counter-truth was then entrusted to the newspaper’s engraver, to whom the drawing henceforth belonged. He had the power to modify it, to go on feeding this imagination, a fake news with no intent to harm. This fabulation of daily life becomes mine. The past catches up with us. Paris is a moveable feast; we had almost forgotten.”
Performances of the paper theatre
- Saturday 23 December 2023, at 5 pm and 7 pm (first performance)
- Saturday 30 December 2023, at 5 pm and 7 pm
- Saturday 6 January 2024, at 3 pm, 5 pm and 7 pm
Owing to its success, the exhibition was extended on Thursday 11 and Friday 12 January 2024, with a few chronicles by Mr. Djub and a galette des rois on the Friday from 6 pm. Thanks to Bénédicte Philippe of Télérama and Lucie Servin of L’Humanité.
Artist: Mr. Djub