Paul Gondry: VALIS - Semiose, Paris
I love an intimidating gallery entrance (I wrote a whole blog about my favourites during lockdown) and can’t think of a better one than 15 Orient in New York City. Up several floors in a dilapidated building in a particularly dodgy part of Chinatown, the gallery door is unlabeled, or it was when I was there anyway. Once you’re inside - possibly after a couple of false starts, and you’ve opened the door to one of the textile businesses elsewhere in the building by mistake - the gallery is low lit and damp.
When I last visited, there was a collection of chic-looking Home Depot orange plastic buckets strewn across the floor, collecting droplets from the ceiling. The windows were open, because the unfriendly gallerist smoked - cigarettes! I think he vibe checked me when I went in and turned away in disgust. I think he might have been French?
l-r, ‘Night Paralysis’ (2026), ‘The Rain Maker’ (2025)
If he was, he might have been Paul Gondry, who co-founded 15 Orient. He’s a music video director (Michel Gondry is his dad!) as well as a painter, and several of his works are on show in the considerably more friendly - and watertight - surroundings of Semiose, up a side street next to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The paintings are dreamy and haunted, Symbolist and Romantic in colour and subject matter: dark forests, bruised skies, ghosts.
Perhaps in deference to the artist’s main gig, the show notes reach for cinematic references: FW Murnau and David Lynch.
This was the penultimate show I saw on my Paris trip, which was as packed and exhausting as ever. Maybe I was primed to love it, as by that point I resembled Gondry’s wraith-like, spectral figures, picked out in such thin oil paint the canvas’ texture shows through. In two hours’ time, I’d be asleep on the Eurostar.
Back in London, his was the show that came back to my mind, now the time has come to write my weekly post on here. The paintings passed my vibe check, clearly.
Paul Gondry: VALIS is at Semiose (Paris). March 14th - May 16th 2026