PARIS | Matignon

18 Jun > 18 Jul 2026

Presentation

This exhibition at the Huberty & Breyne?s Paris | Matignon gallery is the first to bring together a collection of works by Benjamin Bachelier and powerfully demonstrates the coherence of an oeuvre that straddles painting, drawing and comic book.

Original comic book plates form a major focus of the exhibition. They include pages from the latest volumes of Bachelier?s series Le Clan des Otori (Gallimard), written by  Stéphane Melchior. Pages from Oliphant and Smoking, La révolution Yves Saint-Laurent, with scripts by Loo Hui Phang, on display to the public for the first time, reveal Benjamin??Bachelier's ability to adapt his style to very different registers ? from survival stories to more stylised creations relating to the history of clothing and image. A selection of original plates from his newest work, L?été des oubliés, written by Simon Rochepeau and due out from Futuropolis, completes the collection. In these works, Benjamin Bachelier develops a clear visual style where energetic inking and (depending on the story) colour are the organising principle and simultaneously the source of dramatic tension. Each image transcends its simple narrative function to exist in and for itself. 

This principle of a total, committed graphic approach finds its direct extension in the canvases on show. Freed from sequential constraints, Benjamin Bachelier?s compositions are more open, with forms emerging in successive layers. Figures appear without ever quite crystallising, embedded in a dense, at times unstable, colour field. By leaving his canvases unframed, the artist reinforces this sense of frontality: the image is not contained but present in all its materiality. There is, in his paintings, an energy that connects them directly with nature and animal life.

The same is true of Bachelier?s drawings, whether in colour or black and white. There is a rawness, a disconcerting clarity, in these works. The viewer is straightaway immersed in a singular universe that throws up snatches of music and references to Japanese TV pop culture or to yet stranger worlds where human and animal merge. 

What this exhibition highlights is not a juxtaposition of media but a continuity. The comic strips, canvases and works on paper function as a whole: all reveal the same attention to surface, the same structuring through the use of colour or of black and white, the same tension between emergence and erasure of the figure. They are different facets of a single approach, a single body of work, and it is precisely from this interplay that the exhibition draws its strength. It reveals an artist for whom each image, whether narrative or autonomous, derives from the same pictorial impulse, one both challenging and profoundly modern.

OPENING 
Wednesday 17 June 2026
from 6 p.m to 9 p.m..
in the presence of  the artist

EXHIBITION
From Thursday 18 June
to Saturday 18 July 2026

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