Ilan MANOUACH OEuvres complètes

Ilan Manouach?s recent artistic practice looks at the comics genre as a quantifiable corpus, a set of data that can be aggregated, compressed and reorganised according to a system of non-narrative logic. In this new exhibition ? due to run from 19 February to 21 March 2026 at at the Huberty & Breyne Gallery, Paris | Matignon ? Ilan Manouach continues his masterful exploration of a line of research that started with ONEPIECE (2022). The entire print run of the latter sold out in three days and the project generated tens of thousands of online reactions from fans. 

This exhibition presents five monumental new works DragonBall, Naruto, DetectiveConan, Bleach and Berserk ? by compressing several decades of serial publication into a single, monolithic volume.  Each indidual volume is protected by a custom-made slipcase and numbered. 

The project relies on an incredibly simple idea ? the transformation of the serialised narrative into sculpture via material sabotage.  What was read page by page, chapter by chapter, in anticipation of the next episode ? the thing that embodied lived time, anticipation, the simultaneous ageing of reader and author ? becomes here a totalised mass, a physical dataset rendered unreadable by its own exhaustiveness. The work "literalises" the fantasy of the complete archive: thousands of pages per volume constitute the analogue equivalent of databases that machine learning algorithms now ingest in millions of images. But where the machine processes the invisible corpus Manouach materialises it in raw weight. The complete archive becomes the buried archive. Manga logic ? industrial fragmentation, serialisation and digital circulation ? is compressed into objects of a formal radicalism that engages with contemporary questions of storage, computational processing of visual information and the transformation of narrative into a measurable quantity. Where conceptual artists? books favour the page as the smallest single unit, the ?uvres complètes inverts the scale so that the page becomes a mere speck within a whole too vast to be apprehended other than as an inert totality. 

And, finally, Manouach incorporates a new mechanism  into his concept ? the mechanism of rarity, according to which each object is seen to occur more or less frequently. The design, materials and history associated with these creations reinforce their exclusivity. Cognisant of the fact that such rarity fosters a sense of camaraderie and distinction among collectors, Manouach situates these objects (identified as Bronze, Silver or Gold category) within today?s prevailing economic and cultural logic. 

By removing the manga from its original context and monumentalising it within the Western museum space, Manouach produces the physical equivalent of what artificial intelligence accomplishes soundlessly: the reduction of narrative to raw material, to  a processable corpus. This is the death of publishing in sculptural form: everything at once, and therefore nothing at all.

OPENING
Thursday 19 February 2026
from 6 p.m.
in the presence of the artist

EXHIBITION
From Friday 20 February
to Saturday 21 March 2026

PARIS | Matignon
36 avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris
Wednesday > Saturday 11?a.m. ? 7?p.m.