JENNIFER CAUBET | Expectatives
In situ 25 April 2026 - 13 June 2026Philippe Jousse and the team at Jousse Entreprise are pleased to announce the third solo show of Jennifer Caubet, on view from April 25 to June 13, 2026. The opening will take place on Saturday, April 25, from 4 pm to 9 pm, in the presence of the artist. A text by François Piron, art critic and curator, will accompany the exhibition.
Three years ago, in this very space, Jennifer Caubet presented Diffractions (2023), a large-scale sculpture in galvanised metal assembling layers of grates salvaged from the public space. These passive-aggressive objects – used to demarcate private property, enforce order and restrict access – were compacted into a dense structure, the unexpected ornamental quality of which came to the fore. The resulting form evoked a moucharabieh – which is both, as we know, a system of ventilation and a device for seeing. This new exhibition, which brings together several bodies of work, extends Caubet’s ongoing reflection on contemporary social space and the articulation between sculpture and the technical object. Her practice tends towards productions that also operate as engines of fiction, at times bordering on science fiction. Throughout these works, air emerges as a key point of reference: its circulation, its frequent scarcity, and the possibility of conceiving breath, of thinking breathing, in ways that are more or less concrete and allegorical.
The exhibition begins with a sense of stifling. Bundles of clothing are compressed against the wall and tightly bound with stainless steel straps. A ceramic bone and aluminium wedges serve as internal armatures in Body (2026) and Forces (2026): tightly bound bundles, compacted fragments. These abstract sculptures index contemporary modes of existence: clothes accumulating within constrained domestic spaces, overflowing drawers, bulging wardrobes, suffocating beneath ultra-fast fashion. A fastening gives way under the pressure and it blasts.
Exhibited nearby are sculptures under tension that Caubet describes as sticks and lances, tools of support and defense: tapered steel tubes fitted with turned wooden handles remain graspable, yet resist any stable ergonomics. Some, marked with ridges and fitted with an abacus, serve as tools for measuring time and space (JJ/MM/AAAA, 2026). These works retain a certain kinship with the sculptures produced by Isa Genzken in the 1970s: abstract, wooden oblongs, the hyperbolic curves of which were drawn with the help of a computer and the form and materials of which the artist associated with the morphology of guitar bodies. Genzken thus linked her interest in scientifically conceived objects to her engagement in sound experimentation, which extends through Caubet’s occasional collaborations with noise guitarist Nina Garcia. Here, the boundary between object and instrument evokes wind instruments, in which air is contained within these sealed, intertwined “bodies”.
In the next room, the visitor is confronted with the hostile partition of an anti-squat panel. In counterpoint to Diffractions, Rétractions (2026) condenses a dense block of anti-burglary shutters and protective grilles, a security mass folded in on itself, an armoured device poised to unfurl like a spring, a structure of both vision and division recalling custody visiting rooms. In this sense, this work may be read as an “object of knowledge”’, as Michel Foucault defines it in his conception of what a system can be, insofar as it is both an architectural arrangement and the outcome of regulatory decisions, laws, and administrative measures that have governed the design and standardisation of its elements.
The final gallery space is occupied by suspended forms: tubes combining blown glass and perforated metal, evoking systems of ventilation or cooling. Balanced by metal counterweights reminiscent of Duchamp’s “malic moulds” – forms which “mould gas” in his Large Glass -, the installation evokes the fiction of a pneumatic laboratory, structured as much by void and circulation as by insulation and circulation. Rather than alluding to a “Cronenbergian” factory of the future, Caubet’s work engages with the social fabric of the present – one in which the very freedom to breathe may be called into question in the name of maintaining order.
François Piron, Expectatives : sculpture sous tension, 2026
Paris Gallery Weekend — May 29, 30, 31, 2026
Saturday, May 30 | 3:30 pm
Conversation with Tony Côme, design and architecture historian, and artist Jennifer Caubet
Sunday, May 31
2 pm – 6 pm | Special gallery opening
3 pm – 5 pm | Meet the artist Jennifer Caubet
Vernissage : 25/04/2026 12:00 am
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