Intimate Visions, Paris (2025)

A blank canvas only remains so until it is coloured by impressions. What first spoke freshly becomes integrated into a layered chorus of signs seen, heard and thought about: a subjective aesthetic universe constantly shifting, accumulating, deepening.

The works in this exhibition are the voices of just such a chorus, one delicately teased out of Clémande Burgevin Blachman through her back-and-forth dialogue with Mathieu Paris. What we are looking at here is a universe in miniature, an orbit of ideas and aesthetics given form. The urge to map its constellation by joining some dots is as irresistible as it is inevitable.

I know of Burgevin Blachman through my work in fashion, a world in which she is simultaneously discreet and eminent. Professionally, she specialises in the conception and creation of accessories, which exists as the most myriad category in fashion. Where clothes are clothes and shoes are shoes, an accessory is an expansively non-specific classification. Accessories encompass embellishment and function, essence and addition.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an accessory is: ‘a thing which can be added to something else in order to make it more useful, versatile, or attractive.’ By that definition, then, this text is an accessory to the ‘Intimate Visions’ shared here by Burgevin Blachman and Paris. Furthermore, each piece contained within the exhibition's whole is an accessory in its chorus as interconnected fragments of a larger sensibility.

The territory that coverage spans is tellingly precise in its pointed eclecticism. Art, design and ceramics are gathered in an anti-hierarchical adjacency. From Abel Landry to Sterling Ruby, we see works by creators whose range of expressive forms roams beyond and across the prosaic velvet ropes of cultural endeavour. Each work, in its own way, blurs boundaries between disciplines and traditions, inspiring the observation of connections made both via adjacency and contrast. This leads to a chicken-and-egg question: does that variety of taste result from Burgevin Blachman’s working practice in the craft and design of accessories, or is it reflective of the character that enables her to be so masterfully proficient in it?

Whatever the answer (and my instinct leans toward the latter), the freedom of Burgevin Blachman’s range has allowed her and Paris to muster an assembly of works that, between them, generate some fascinating conceptual acoustics. There is a resonance here that goes beyond materiality, an echoing of ideas and forms across three centuries and multiple movements. The collaborative nature of this selection amplifies its impact, each piece reinforcing and refracting the next.

I subjectively adore the inclusion of a writer’s painting: especially one by a writer who wrestled so grippingly with the symbols of text. That impression is enriched by observing how Victor Hugo’s swirling Channel Island babel of a skyscape reflects the churning textural surfaces of Ruby’s canvases, the opaque overdye of Landry’s watercolour landscapes, the rough lacquer patina of Clément Massier’s ceramics, and the brassy depths of Aristide Maillol’s sculptures.

Most often in Maillol’s work, but also across the whole exhibition, the female body recurs as an elusive cipher across this gathered patchwork of expressive surfaces. Maillol was a neo-Classicist who shaped new perspectives on collective cultural memory. Through the evenness of his representation and its lack of prosaic sexualisation, his work also prefigured later shifts in perspective about identity, gaze and motive. Here, the sinuous lines of that evolving narrative are variously plotted through the lenses of Hughie Lee-Smith, Tracey Emin and Gustav Klimt. Each of these artists, in their own way, interrogates representation, complicating received notions of femininity, desire and selfhood.

That sinuosity leads to Art Nouveau, a movement whose spirit and philosophy seem perhaps to act as subconscious parentheses to the whole of this display. Franz von Stuck’s imaginatively figurative painting of a winged putto, an Eros, steering a grizzled centaur finely encapsulates its sensually uninhibited and symbolically freighted approach to the artistic psyche – a psyche that embraces beauty as a means of disruption as much as decoration.

The radical aspect of Art Nouveau’s representation of women and its pre-abstract openness to the interpretation of dreams, instincts and matters beyond the literal has, in retrospect, sometimes been obscured by critical hindsight’s suspicion towards the prettiness of its lines and the perceived indulgence of its decorative ethos. In this exhibition, however, an approach that was radical at its inception resonates directly alongside the contemporarily progressive work of Emin and Ruby. Thanks to the adjacencies born from Burgevin Blachman and Paris’ curatorial dialogue, what time has sanitised powerfully reasserts its place in the lineage of progressive experimentation – just as Maillol once translated antiquity into the avant-garde.

Of all this exhibition’s disciplinary span across art and design, I’m most personally transfixed by the extraordinary bamboo and printed leather armchair designed by an anonymous hand circa 1920. It is a throne that incorporates an almost surrealistic combination of elements, most pointedly its painted spheres: an uncanny object that seems to slip between function and fantasy. It feels like a piece that has travelled as a meteor from some completely different artistic atmosphere before landing quietly in ours. And because it is an orphaned object without a sign, stamp or author – with only that date to affix it to a spot in the matrix – the mystery of its brilliance and the freedom behind its conception is only heightened. It is both an artefact and enigma.

Which reflects back to Hugo, who wrote: ‘There is nothing like a dream to create the future.’ I imagine him sitting portside in offshore exile, huddled in a magnificent topcoat and wreathed in his beard, dabbing at this picture and thinking this thought. That invitation to dream, to dwell in introspection, and then to allow the art that this marination inspires to stand as its signpost seems central to the dialogue shared by Burgevin Blachman and Paris. Theirs is an exhibition that does not demand the closure of a conclusion but instead provokes an ongoing dialectic that embraces multiple disciplines, periods and mindsets. The attitude is the accessory.

As much as the objects it unearths, this exhibition excavates the resonances between them: the points of intersection through which, albeit likely very clumsily, you can start to speculatively trace the universe of taste and thought whose gravity drew these things together. All are accessories to an imagination whose outlook roams far and freely.

Luke Leitch