Artist: Rémi Noël

The exhibition Poetry Wanted, dedicated to the work of Rémi Noël, brings together a selection of emblematic photographs alongside previously unseen works that extend, shift, and reactivate his visual universe through objects and language.

For several years, Rémi Noël has developed a body of work situated at the intersection of photography, language, and conceptual détournement. His practice draws on collective imagery, popular mythologies, and instantly recognizable symbols, which he manipulates with a freedom infused with irony. In his work, the gravity of the icon constantly coexists with an offbeat sense of humor: a subtle shift, an unexpected association, or an absurd displacement is enough to unsettle our ways of seeing.

The title Poetry Wanted functions as an ambiguous slogan. At once a call, an injunction, and a fictional tagline, it evokes both the aesthetic of American wanted posters and the desire to rediscover, within the endless circulation of contemporary images, a form of poetry that still remains possible. This tension runs throughout the exhibition: between popular culture and conceptual language, between immediate emotion and critical distance.

His photographs, often conceived as fragments of narratives or visual quotations, engage with mechanisms of memory and projection. Rémi Noël does not document reality; he recomposes, disrupts, and recirculates it in new forms. Cultural, sporting, cinematic, and media references become the raw material of a visual vocabulary in which the image functions simultaneously as trace and sign.

Through this exhibition, the artist initiates an unprecedented dialogue between his photographs and a series of diverted objects drawn from popular culture (video game consoles, typewriters, domestic accessories, and more). Removed from their original contexts and reassembled, these objects become conceptual sculptures: surfaces for mental projection where technological nostalgia, popular culture, and collective memory intersect through processes of détournement, appropriation, and semantic displacement. Humor emerges here as a critical strategy, almost a method, for disarming the authority of images while simultaneously revealing their symbolic power.

Play occupies a central place in this work, not as mere entertainment but as a cultural and conceptual structure: a space of simulation, fiction, and codified modes of perception. By infiltrating playful objects with iconic imagery, Rémi Noël exposes the systems of representation that shape the contemporary imagination. His works thus operate as visual collisions in which high and popular culture, intimate memory and global iconography, coexist.

For the first time, the exhibition will also feature a room entirely dedicated to a series of photographs depicting American landscapes and scenes (motels, deserted roads, neon signs, anonymous architectures) accompanied by famous quotations drawn from literature, cinema, and American popular culture. Presented as a slide projection, this immersive installation introduces a narrative and temporal dimension akin to experimental cinema or a mental archive. Here again, Rémi Noël plays with signs and codes: the words do not illustrate the images but rather displace them, sometimes contradicting them or opening unexpected spaces of interpretation. This tension between text and image firmly situates his work within a conceptual tradition in which language itself becomes a fully fledged visual material.

Balancing discreet humor, visual poetry, and strategies of détournement, Poetry Wanted ultimately unfolds as a journey through contemporary imaginaries, a space where images, objects, and words cease to function as mere references and instead become critical, sensitive, and profoundly ambiguous tools.