Galerie Christophe Gaillard is pleased to present Pascal Convert's first solo exhibition at its Paris space, from October 10 to November 21, 2026.
Opening: Saturday, October 10, 2026, 4–8 pm
An ode to joy
Imagine that art were child’s play; and imagine a child with white hair since birth who knows that their story will finish where it started, at a geometric point with no precise location. A child who has just spoken of someone who died. Themselves, perhaps.
Some look after the living. Many of them, in fact; they’re proud and they laugh. Out loud. I am one of the few who look after the dead. Every morning, I am confronted with silence. In the tree, the bird hones its green cry as the water gently draws the sunrise towards the sea that rises like an immense tombstone.
Governed by the rhythm of the tides, it is here that the legend of glassmaking was born; an alchemy where fire meets sand like the hope of a resurrection. Master glassmakers refer to red glass as “blood of Christians” in memory of the Passion of Christ, stripped of his divinity to become a poor, suffering man. A musician of silence, Mary Magdalene watches over him, head bowed. She has dipped her pearl-grey hair into the rippling waters of the Jordan which envelops the baptised figure.
Before her, the sand takes on a greyish hue, from which an immense geoglyph emerges. Its graphite coating has a glassy taste that could break teeth. With straight and curved lines by the dozen, surviving traces of a sitting room adorned with glass-covered woodwork, l’Appartement de l’artiste (the Artist’s Apartment), until then open to the returning light, has closed in on itself like a book. Now a floor surrounded by crystal candelabra, it is a celebration of silence. From Afghanistan’s graveyard of empires, an embroidered shroud is suspended like a colossal map pointing the way in this geometric labyrinth.
We descend several steps and cross a paved courtyard before entering a space covered in ashen crosses, fragile remnants from the walls of Armenian monasteries, the gardens of souls not yet destroyed by the Azerbaijani army when destruction returned, from Nagorno-Karabakh to Ukraine, Gaza and beyond.
In the centre, sixteen crystallized books recount the History of France (Histoire de France), a country that has known royalty, empire, revolution and Republic. A country now facing its destiny; the past gone and the future yet to unfold.
On a glass photograph, Lucie Aubrac, a child with a diaphanous, silent gaze, knows that we must meet what comes, even when darkness reigns. She knows that in times of resistance, art remains an ode to joy.
Pascal Convert, September 2026.
