SMITH, Sans titre (Sub Limis), série Löyly, 2010. C-print sur papier satiné contrecollé sur aluminium. Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris, Bruxelles
Image from the series “Sub limis:” obscure etymology; possibly from sub-limen, sublimen: “sloping up to the lintel.”
An artist-researcher, SMITH (born 1985) navigates between photography, moving images, installation, sculpture and performance. His work develops in open cycles, often starting with photographs. Shrugging off chronology, he shifts the boundaries of portraiture and landscape, opening up a space where the human, animal, plant, mineral and celestial realms intertwine. His work is informed by a poetics of metamorphosis which overflows the realm of the real, traverses in-between spaces, and inhabits thresholds rather than certainties. Forms slide, identities shift, bodies transform, perception shifts gears. From fluctuating states of consciousness, between trance and psychedelia, SMITH weaves a network of correspondences between bodily and cognitive practices and experimental scientific and technological devices, in search of a point of contact where spirituality, sensitivity and technology can finally recompose together.
At MAC VAL, the artist’s works have featured in the group shows “Lignes de vies – une exposition de légendes” (Lifelines – an Exhibition of Legends) in 2019 and “Histoires vraies” (“True Stories”) in 2023.
SMITH, Untitled, in “Désidération (Prologue), 2019 / Courtesy Galerie Christophe Gaillard / Modds
SMITH, Sans titre, série Désidération (Anamanda Sîn), 2017-2022. Tirage sur aluminium brossé. Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris, Bruxelles
SMITH, Self-portrait, 2021. © SMITH, Adagp, Paris, 2022
Sans titre, in Dami (Fulmen), 2024. Image réalisée dans le cadre de la résidence INSTANTS, « Château Palmer x Leica ». Thermogramme sur aluminium brossé. Courtesy Galerie Christophe Gaillard © SMITH
SMITH, Sans titre, série Désidération (Prologue), 2017-2021. Tirage sur aluminium brossé. Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris, Bruxelles
The words of the exhibition curator
SMITH was born in 1985. After completing a Master’s degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne, he studied at the École de la Photographie d’Arles and then at Le Fresnoy. In 2022, he submitted his thesis at UQAM (Montreal). A research-driven artist, he moves between photography, installation, moving images, sculpture and performance.
Working at the intersection of expanded states of consciousness, philosophy and cutting- edge scientific research – from IRAP (Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology) to the CNES Space Observatory (National Centre for Space Studies) – and by focusing on the points where these regimes of knowledge come into friction or resonance with forms of spirituality, SMITH surrounds himself with a constellation of intellectual and practical collaborators, from Lucien Raphmaj to Jean-Philippe Uzan, from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to Timothy Leary, from Corine Sombrun to the Limiñanas, from Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy to Donna Haraway, from Paul B. Preciado to François Chaignaud, from Marie NDiaye to many others. Most of the time, he works in collaboration with philosophers, scientists, researchers, thinkers, artists, writers, performers, and musicians, and this way of working creates a temporary family, a living compost, where ideas mingle, mutate and are passed on.
Sans titre, in Dami (Travelogue), 2024. Tirage sur aluminium brossé. Courtesy Galerie Christophe Gaillard / Modds © SMITH
SMITH, Sans titre, in “Dami (Fulmen)”, 2023. Image réalisée dans le cadre de la résidence INSTANTS, “Château Palmer × Leica”. Thermogramme sur aluminium brossé. Courtesy Galerie Christophe Gaillard
SMITH, Sans titre, série Désidération (Année 2666), 2021. Thermogramme, impression sur aluminium. Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris, Bruxelles
SMITH, Sans titre (Spree), série Löyly, 2008. C-Print sur papier satiné. Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris, Bruxelles
He seeks to bring forth alternative perceptions of reality. He practises an art of trance and weightlessness, in which the experience is composed of presences, spectres, apparitions, flashes of insight, and sometimes epiphanies. In this context, conversion refers less to a new belief than to a shift in attention, a point of convergence from which to reorient ourselves.
Driven by a lucid romanticism, SMITH endeavours to lift the veil of the obvious in order to re-establish a fundamental connection with other forms of life and with the cosmos. This exploration is undertaken from the viewpoint of resistance, which means creating alternative ways of inhabiting the world. A corpus of thresholds, transmutations and metamorphoses, constructed in porous series that undo linear chronology, whilst blurring the boundaries between portraiture and landscape and, more broadly, the binary markers of the disciplines he engages with – between the visible and the invisible, between inner experience and the political, between science and spirituality, between documentary and fiction.
L’extase de M. Patate, 2024. Vue d’installation. Courtesy Galerie Christophe Gaillard © SMITH
TRAUM © SMITH
SMITH, Sans titre (Fulmen), série Dami 2022-2024. Thermogramme, tirage sur aluminium. Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris, Bruxelles
SMITH, Sans titre, in Dami (Fulmen), 2024
Spectographies 009, 2015 © SMITH
For it is indeed a matter of mutation, transformation and metamorphosis, but also of incompleteness and restlessness, understood as working conditions rather than as gaps to be filled. Conceived as a labyrinth, a cluster, a forest of initiatory journeys and transformative gestures, the exhibition affirms its role as a laboratory. Something is underway. It remains in motion, bringing together works already established, almost fossilised, and works in the making.
Nothing stays stable. He develops a poetics of metamorphosis, attentive to the in-between zones, to states of fluidity where identities and forms cease to be assignable. In this vein, his artist’s name, SMITH, in capital letters, functions as a generic handle, deliberately non-specific in time, difficult to pin down, gender-neutral, and suggests an attempt at emancipation that involves a relative erasure of the ego in favour of that which circulates, transforms and connects.
His work takes the form of interdisciplinary projects that subvert the very notion of a work of art (in the sense of a unique and rare object caught up in a logic of capitalist value). It seeks to materialise portals, portals between different levels, different strata of reality.
This exhibition has been designed in collaboration with architects and designers Matthieu Prat (Diplomates) and Sami Rintala, assisted by Toni Lozano. The monograph “Ici grand ouvert” brings together old and new works in a sweeping movement that reveals the artist’s output in the light of his present and future inquiries.
Exhibition organised with the collaboration and support of Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris. With the support of Studio Superpartners
This project has been awarded the Bicentennial of Photography label by the Ministry of Culture and is part of the official Bicentennial program from September 1, 2026 to September 30, 2027.
SMITH: Ici Grand Ouvert
May 23, 2026 – January 31, 2027 / MAC VAL
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