In the beginning was the pedestal, or the doormat. Jacques Julien’s art gives to an ordinary carpet, a plastic basin, a skateboard, a fake stone, a resin cube or a sheet of plaster a double destiny: pedestal and sculpture. These objects support a set of superimposed artifact fragments, sealing their sculptural status in the process.

The « S/M/L » exhibition plays with the tension between pedestal and sculpture, presenting a range of works, some of them previously unseen, that exhibit this duality. This first dichotomy is enriched by a second, reduction and enlargement, visible in the exhibition’s scenography. In fact, Jacques Julien’s work includes a large number of smallscale, model-like sculptures, as well as more imposing ones, all retaining the same vocabulary of forms, which will be presented in the PARIS-B gallery spaces according to their scale.

It’s as if the smaller models could be transformed into giants, and the larger ones were destined to undergo a miniaturized metamorphosis, reminiscent of certain cartoons or Silly Symphonies that the artist would not disavow. On a cover of the 1970 comic strip The Flindstones, we can see the father creating a sculptural portrait of his little daughter, posing in front of him. The work, an imposing anthropomorphic stone, is surmounted by several bones, while the stool supporting it seems to belong to the assemblage, recalling Jacques Julien’s sculptures, which lead us, within the exhibition, to a singular encounter: Brancusi at the Flintstones.

— Marjolaine Lévy, curator.