In the beginning was the base, or the doormat. Jacques Julien’s art gives ordinary objects—such as a rug, a plastic basin, a skateboard, a fake stone, a resin cube, or a plaster slab—a dual destiny, both as a pedestal and as a sculpture. These objects support a collection of stacked artifact fragments, and through this assembly, they seal their sculptural ascension. The exhibition “S/M/L” plays with the tension between base and sculpture by presenting a series of works, some of them new, that display this duality. This initial dichotomy is enriched by a second one, the contrast between reduction and enlargement, evident in the exhibition’s very scenography. Indeed, Jacques Julien’s work includes numerous small sculptures that resemble models and larger ones that maintain the same vocabulary of forms, displayed in the PARIS-B gallery spaces according to their scale.

The first set of works opening the exhibition belongs to the “Milan” series (2024), a title that confirms Jacques Julien’s inclinations towards forms conceived by the artists and designers of the Milanese Memphis group, founded in 1980 by Ettore Sottsass, and towards the Italian avant-garde, particularly Lucio Fontana’s Teatrini (1964-1966) and the sculptural miniatures of Lucio Del Pezzo and Fausta Squatriti (Sculture colorate, 1964-1974). Jacques Julien’s sculptures indeed display the attributes of a certain Italian aesthetic with chromatic and formal exuberance: a fragment of a yellow shovel sits atop a blue cube, itself topped by a pink sphere, while the silhouette of a heart perches on a green platform, chains hang from a white prism placed on a tiny red stage, and the head of a bone emerges from a white cube with pink stripes.

Like their smaller counterparts, the medium-sized sculptures presented in the exhibition are characterized by abstraction with “cartoonish” forms and pop colors, as exemplified by Vagabond (2011-2024), where a stone turned pink serves as a base for a metal chain rising upward, stopped at its peak by a bolster with white and black stripes, reminiscent of the prisoner outfits in early Disney cartoons (The Chain Gang, 1930). Moreover, these works occupy an ambiguous space between pure abstraction and a determined commitment to representation. Jacques Julien aims to assert the capacity of forms to play freely, to break free from rules, much like cartoon characters but also akin to the slapstick cinema of Buster Keaton, whom the artist often references. It may not be far-fetched to see in the reference to Keaton an expression of a fondness for brief, quirky forms, such as the short film in the golden age of slapstick, a quality that Jacques Julien’s works, with their miniaturism and joyful clash of found object fragments, celebrate.

The final series, titled Aladdin Toys (After Joaquín Torres García) (2024), also draws upon Disney fiction but more importantly references the avant-gardes, directly alluding to the Aladdin toy brand created in 1921 by the Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres García. Torres García’s toy-making activities placed the concept of “construction” at the heart of his poetics, allowing for the development of his constructivist idiom. Designed by Jacques Julien for the scenography of the dance performance Béaba (2024) by Valeria Giuga and Anne-James Chaton, dedicated to language learning, these monumental monochrome sculptures, which are manipulated on stage, remain silent and immobile in the exhibition space. These abstract volumes appear as enlargements of certain sculptural fragments presented upstairs, as if the deeper the viewer descends into the space, the more they zoom into the artist’s work.

In the exhibition “S/M/L,” it seems as though small models could transform into giants, and that the largest ones are destined for a miniaturized metamorphosis, reminiscent of certain cartoons or Silly Symphony that the artist would not disown. On the cover of a 1970 The Flintstones comic book, one can see the father sculpting a portrait of his little daughter, who poses in front of him. The work, a massive anthropomorphic stone, is topped with several bones, while the stool supporting it seems to belong to the assembly, reminiscent of Jacques Julien’s sculptures that lead us, within the exhibition, to a unique encounter: “Brancusi in the Flintstones.” The French ethnologist André Leroi-Gourhan, a specialist in Prehistory, recounts that among the foundational gestures of the Neanderthals, they would collect fragments of wood and stones not for their potential functionality but for their formal, almost abstract, strangeness. In Jacques Julien’s sculptural superpositions, made from the unexpected collage of objects and trinkets chosen by the artist amidst the colorful bazaar of his studio, where other artifacts also await a new destiny, there is a sense of joyful ruins, a kind of primitive abstraction that echoes Robert Smithson’s words in Ultramoderne (1967): “Nothing is new, nothing is old either, distant futures meet distant pasts.”

— Marjolaine Lévy, curator.