La Maison du Léopard

Sometimes an exhibition bears a title like a mask, a metaphor, or a key. The Leopard’s House, in the work of Paul Israël, is all three at once. One enters it as one might step into a dream: a house with no fixed walls, inhabited by echoes, fragments, and invisible presences.

A painter, writer, and compassless traveller, Paul Israël has made wandering his method and doubt his foundation. From the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis where he grew up—a living mosaic of scents, voices, and colours—to the roads of 1970s Europe, he has continuously explored reality through its margins.

Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he early on moved among figures of the alternative scene and took part in the creation of journals where text and image engage in open dialogue. His work flourishes in that fertile chiaroscuro where painting, writing, dreaming, and memory meet. Though he claims no affiliation, the spirit of Surrealism flows through his canvases like a free breath. Pivotal encounters—Claude Tarnaud, Jacques Lacomblez—formed bridges to a lineage of poets whose voices, even in silence, cast light upon the image.

In The Leopard’s House, Paul Israël does not seek to show so much as to invite us to dwell. The titular animal—both predator and apparition—suggests a watcher at the threshold, a force lying in wait between instinct and enigma. Each artwork is a room, a recess in this mental house, where remnants of childhood, drifting visions, and shards of the world coexist.

For Paul Israël, painting is not about illustrating a concept, but about allowing what remains—when words fade—to surface. His canvases are the precipitates of a gaze that is anxious, tender, lucid.

There is in them a fidelity to wonder, a kind of poetic resistance to the disenchantment of the world.

The exhibition stands as a threshold: into the intimate, the invisible, the strangely familiar. A space for listening. A house where the leopard keeps watch—and perhaps, dreams.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Snapshots - Instantanés de New York

or

Reinventing New York — between pigment, pixels, and memory

Galerie Catherine Pennec is delighted to present the exhibition Snapshots – Instantanés de New York by visual artist Frédéric Nolleau, on view from October 16 to November 15, 2025.

Trained as a graphic designer, Frédéric Nolleau creates hybrid works that blend photography and painting. Starting from his own photographs taken on the streets of New York, he transforms each image through a process of physical experimentation — scratching, layering, erasing, pigmenting — pushing the original material toward a new visual and sensory state.

This new body of work offers a mental landscape of New York, far removed from the postcard cliché. The artist seeks out visual tension, ambiguity, and the hidden rhythms of the urban environment. His images are not reproductions of the city but evocations of an inner space, shaped by memory, imagination, and gesture.

“What I’m looking for is tension. Atmosphere. Something slightly unstable, on the edge of the visible,” explains Nolleau.

“I’m not aiming for a beautiful picture — I look for ambiguous zones.”

The opening reception will take place on Thursday, October 16 at 6 p.m., with the artist in attendance. Visitors will be able to explore his singular visual language — influenced by contemplative cinema, fragmented narratives, and the layered density of urban life.