le Fonds d'Art Contemporain - Paris collection

As part of the carte blanche to Nikesco, the Saint-Éloi library and the Fonds d'Art Contemporain - Paris collections offer you: an exhibition, a guided tour, and two creative workshops.

For this new partnership, the Fonds d’art contemporain – Paris Collections and the Saint-Eloi library have decided to work around representations of masculinities and gender identities in contemporary art.

The 5 selected works were chosen with the complicity of Nikesco, an illustrator and comic book author who is currently offering a carte blanche at the library.

In his graphic novels published by Editions Lapin and Exemplaire, Nikesco tells the story of his daily life as a young deaf and queer man.

From a pre-selection made by the Fonds d’art contemporain team, Nikesco chose works that represent men or non-binary people and question gender norms.

In the press area, two portraits face each other: Le jeune homme en rouge by Jean Malaval (1958) and Louis XVI ou le roi vu par le peuple by Jean-Philippe Lemée (1999).

The anonymous man in the portrait by Jean Malaval, an artist with an atypical dual career as a painter and cyclist, looks at us ambiguously: is it provocation, amusement, or seduction?

Jean-Philippe Lemée, for his part, reinterprets the iconography of royal portraits, by using sketches by amateur artists in a participatory and playful approach. In the basement, the public can discover three recent acquisitions by the City of Paris.

A pastel-coloured drawing by Ellande Jaureguiberry subverts the virile aesthetic of sport and bodybuilding.

Two other graphic artworks by Edi Dubien and the duo Tirdad Hashemi and Soufia Erfanian depict queer identities and are poetic testimonies of gender transition journeys or exile linked to LGBTPphobias.

All the works play with stereotypes associated with masculinities: in these representations, men are in turn mocked, sensual, vulnerable. Come and discover them from June 2! This event is part of the Mois Parisien du