SIMON MARTIN | La rivière
In situ 19 June 2025 - 31 July 2025Galerie Jousse Entreprise is pleased to announce La Rivière, the new solo show by Simon Martin at the gallery, from 19 June to 20 September 2025. The opening will take place on Thursday 19 June from 4pm to 9pm, with the artist. (*summer closing 27 July to September 1 inclusive)
Simon Martin’s new exhibition at the Galerie Jousse Entreprise, entitled “La Rivière”, marks a shift in his work. The intimate, which has always been one of his primary preoccupations, is no longer expressed solely in its emotional texture or latent sensuality: it becomes heterogeneous material, troubled ground where an implicit commentary on the way in which our subjectivities are formed and diffracted in the contemporary world.
Once again, Simon Martin’s starting point is what is familiar to him: the intimacy of his telephone screen. He starts off by recreating the shape of this digital environment. All the canvases are long and vertical, modelled on the proportions of a smartphone. The thinness of the paint layer – much finer than in his previous series – is a direct reference to screens. Most of the paintings follow the same logic: a collage of two images selected during his browsing on the Internet and juxtaposed to evoke the continuous dynamics of scrolling*. This visual construction, in which each painting becomes a reflection of the temporary pause between two snippets of content, transposes the discontinuous flow of screens into the painting. The hanging of the paintings reinforces this sensation; they are arranged very close together, producing an almost mechanical visual repetition. In this way, the works act as a saturated surface, a kind of screen wall that overwhelms the eye.
The intimate, a theme which Simon Martin has until now approached with romanticism, shifts here towards something ambiguous, even distressing. It is no longer the tenderness of relationships so much as the moments of solitary latency, spent scrolling, that are examined here: the way in which our subjectivities are formed and dissolve into the incessant flow of images, and our inability to control this process. A diffracted narrative is created, a kind of exquisite visual corpse that abolishes all hierarchy between past and present, high and popular culture. On the canvases, a portrait of the Danish painter Hammershøi interacts with make-up tutorials, while a domestic scene re-enacting Caillebotte’s Les Raboteurs sits alongside a body-building session.
The principle of collage produces in particular a tension that arises from the subtle shift between the recognisable and the unknown: banal images become disturbing when taken out of context and juxtaposed with seemingly unrelated ones. In line with the psychoanalytical tradition and the affect theory, this shift brings to the surface the shadow of what our visual routines convey – norms, desires and impulses. The digital unconscious becomes pictorial matter, and it is within this friction between intimate saturation and loss of reference points that the tension of the exhibition lies. The acid green which stands out in some canvases, for the first time in Simon Martin’s work, accentuates this dissonance: it evokes the special effects artificial green screens, like so many simulated realities. The more subterranean recurring presence of water – rain, puddles, reflections – which is often cloudy, perpetuates this anxiety. It encapsulates the uneasiness of our digital intimacy: narcissistic needs, the elusive nature of images, the fear of deletion.
*The word “scroll” refers to the act of scrolling through content on a screen, often to access new content below. The concept of scrolling applies to any screen on which all available content isn’t shown at once and is often used by social media such as Twitter, Reddit, TikTok and Instagram. The content displayed is potentially infinite, as with every scroll more loads.
Image: Simon Martin, Milkshake recipe and algae in a river, 2026, huile sur toile, 180 x 90 cm.
Press release (PDF)Vernissage : 19/06/2025 4:00 pm
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