The Best Shows to See During the Paris Summer Olympics

Laurent Le Deunff | Semiose | 22 June – 17 August

Visitors to Laurent Le Deunff’s ‘Whatever This May Be’ are greeted by a parade of charming rustic wood carvings — from totem pole-like sculptures fusing together friendly animals and household objects, to a series of primitive booby traps made from twine, logs and branches arranged in a circular procession around the gallery space. But some of these sculptures are not like the others. While a few of these individual works are in fact carved wood, the majority are made from delicately sculpted concrete, cut with faux-splinters and dabbed with fake moss to imitate wood. Le Deunff toys with the semiotics of woodiness, and its implied suggestion of the raw. Le Deunff’s concrete works take most pleasure in the craft of rusticage, or the mimicry of the texture and appearance of wood, while his genuine wood pieces brazenly indulge in appearing like synthesized goods, such as the knotty globules of wax dripping down the sides of a candle in Châtaignier (Chestnut, 2024).

One exception to his tricksome craftsmanship appears discretely at the show’s end. 3 os (3 bones, 2022) consists of three small dog bone-shaped chew toys carved from alabaster. To behold this work is to immediately consider the sensation of gnawing on the polished stone, and by then you’ve fallen into Le Deunff’s trap, your senses spinning amid his delightful puzzles of form and material.

Thomas Mailaender | Maison Européenne de la Photographie | 12 June – 29 September

Throughout his carte blanche retrospective at the MEP, Thomas Mailaender boldly treads the delicate line between brilliance and stupidity, committing to and refining each of his half-baked conceits until they reach a kind of sublime idiocy. Recalling the stoned, deadpan photo-conceptualism of early William Wegman, Mailaender builds tension between the crassness of his readymade imagery — flea market gag gifts, internet pranks, botched selfies, a commissioned portrait by Pricasso, ‘the world’s only artist who paints with his penis’ — and the tasteful precision with which he archives, mounts and stages this work. In his Fail Anthology series (2024), crude memes are ennobled being being reproduced in black and white, like front-page photos of vintage newspapers, and presented in a dazzling grid of candy-coloured frames.

Meanwhile, his disarmingly pretty Résine series (2023-2024) sets collages of found images, fast food wrappers, flattened cans and flowers in glistening blocks of clear resin. In one of these crystalline tablets, a printed webpage from collegehumor.com circa the early 2000s is suspended like the amber-bound mosquito harbouring prehistoric DNA in Jurassic Park (1993). What Mailaender has managed to preserve so perfectly here is a lost world in which the internet was still a sprawling junk pile of innocuous stupidity, poor taste and unfiltered surprises. I also don’t remember the last time I laughed this much in an art museum.

‘Peace More Real’ | Galerie Allen | 29 June – 27 July

Tucked within a shaded courtyard, the consistently stellar Galerie Allen offers a tranquil retreat from the heat and chaos of a city gearing up for the summer Olympic games. Curated by Natsuko Uchino, ‘Peace More Real’ gathers work by four of the gallery’s represented artists – Uchino, Mel O'Callaghan, Angelica Mesiti and Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann – plus two gorgeous serigraphs by legendary American ‘pop art nun’ Sister Corita Kent. A text by critic Camille Azaïs describing the cultivation of ancient wheat sets a non-intrusive theme of balance and reciprocity, as a range of understated and delicately crafted artworks — sculpture, prints, video installation, furniture, collage — quietly harmonize with the transcendental drone of Mesiti’s Untitled (Sound Sculpture) 1-3 (2015): two electric harmoniums placed on the gallery floor, their plaintive chords sustained by large volcanic stones resting on the instruments’ keys.

‘Arab Presences’ | Musée d'Art Moderne | 5 April – 25 August

The Musée d'Art Moderne’s staggering exhibition of work by over 130 West Asian and North African artists loosely organizes its swathe of paintings and drawings into four chronological eras, starting with the slow dissolution of the Ottoman Empire which began in 1908 and ending with the 1988 inaugural exhibition of Paris’ Arab World Institute. The show’s curatorial thesis presents the city as a reflection of vampiric European orientalism, but also as a beacon of avant-garde influence and a strategic intellectual hub for various anticolonial movements throughout the 20th century. The works themselves quote familiar modernist motifs of the Western canon — from cubism and surrealism to hard-edge abstraction and pop art — often reconfiguring them into something thrilling and seldom seen in large European institutional shows such as this.

Some highlights include the ecstatic pastel whimsy of self-taught Algerian artist Baya, a gorgeous, ethereal café scene (Traditional Coffee, 1950) by Lebanese painter Farid Aouad, a series of nightmarish gouache and ink interiors by Syrian artist Laila Muraywid, and a hallucinatory, sand-swept abstraction (La Naissance de Cadmus, 1963) by Palestinian painter Juliana Seraphim. Not to be missed.

Matthew Barney | Fondation Cartier | 8 June – 8 September

Love him or hate him, the Willy Wonka of wounded masculinity is back. In ‘SECONDARY,’ Matthew Barney’s ostentatious football-themed spectacle, the artist recreates/deconstructs his childhood memory of an infamous sports injury that ended the career of New England Patriots wide receiver Darryl Stingley. Presented on an arena-like arrangement of ceiling-mounted jumbotrons, the five-channel video work features a cast of dancers, vocalists and Barney himself in a series of ominous vignettes filmed in the artist’s Long Island City studio. The work is exactly the brash, high-def surrealism Barney has made since his career-defining ‘Cremaster Cycle’ series (1994–2002): inscrutable characters busying themselves in occult, wordless rituals, often incorporating an array of slimy materials, set to a high-intensity soundtrack of gurgling, grunting, murmuring and, occasionally, screaming.

‘SECONDARY’ does, however, offer a pared-back second half downstairs, where Barney has staged a comparatively minimal selection from his early video series ‘Drawing Restraint’ (1987–89), made at Yale University when he was a college quarterback. In these grainy, black and white videos, a young Barney attempts to make simple drawings while encumbering himself with a variety of obstacles, weights and harnesses inspired by hypertrophy techniques used in football training. Raw, economical and funny, the works provide a rare glimpse of the notorious maximalist exercising self-restraint.

_{Jewad Selim, Alqailoula,1958, oil on canvas, 69 ×102 cm. Courtesy: ©EstateJewad Selim and Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar}