xevi solà | endless sun-days at opera gallery new york

“The human gesture carries memory. It is imperfect, singular and embodied. In a world dominated by repetition and automation, gesture becomes a space of resistance.”

Pauline Guerrier says this plainly, without romanticising it, and it neatly sums up why her work feels so at home inside ‘Beyond Our Horizons,’ the exhibition opening at la Galerie du 19M from 29 January to 26 April 2026. Presented by Chanel’s métiers d’art hub between Paris and Aubervilliers, the show arrives in France after a successful run in Tokyo and centres on a dialogue that is slow, physical and deeply human: Japanese and French craftsmanship in conversation.

But if you want to understand the soul of Le19M’s latest blockbuster exhibition, you don’t start in the pristine, Rudy Ricciotti-designed gallery itself. You start down the road, in a former perfume factory filled with concrete dust and drying paint.

This is POUSH, the sprawling artists’ incubator in Aubervilliers and the current workspace of Guerrier. The French artist, a Beaux-Arts de Paris alumnus who cut her teeth under the legendary Giuseppe Penone, is the perfect guide for this journey. Her practice is built on what she calls the “anthropology of the gesture,” trekking from Italian glassblowers to weavers in Benin to rescue ancestral techniques from oblivion.

Those two rhythms came together at Le19M, Chanel’s purpose-built home for its eleven Maisons d’art, including Desrues, Lemarié, Lesage, Montex and Maison Michel. Together with nearly thirty French and Japanese artisans, they have turned the gallery into a space of wonder and exchange. Curated by a collective of five creatives – including Momoko Ando and Aska Yamashita – the show has expanded for its Paris debut, with ten new designers joining to push the limits of how heritage and innovation can feed off each other.

“This exhibition embodies the dialogue between the French artisans of the Maisons d’art of le19M and their Japanese counterparts. It illustrates how heritage and innovation can coexist and feed off each other,” says Bruno Pavlovsky, President of le19M.

When Guerrier first entered the workshops, the connection was immediate. “At POUSH, my practice is raw – I don’t go looking for precision right away,” Guerrier tells us. “But then that energy gets filtered through the hands of the artisans. It’s not a conflict; they need each other.”

Her contribution to ‘Beyond Our Horizons’ is distilled into the Tako Tsubo series, which encapsulates the exhibition’s wider ambitions. The starting point was a small but deeply personal object: a mother-of-pearl music box found years ago at the Saint-Ouen flea market. That discovery pushed Guerrier towards Japanese techniques such as marquetry and lacquer, and philosophies including kintsugi and wabi-sabi. 

“What is sacred is this return to the object itself, to its capacity for repair, and to the idea that a fracture can be considered a strength rather than a flaw.” For Guerrier, the music box remains a tangible meeting point between French craft history and Japanese thought.

To translate these ideas materially, she worked with Maison Desrues, the historic house known for crafting Chanel’s buttons and costume jewellery. Guerrier delved into their archives, selecting precious and semi-precious beads to explore the art of repair. The reference to kintsugi is clear, but never too literal.

“The beading acts like a reparative skin,” she explains. She isn’t hiding the cracks; on the contrary, she’s making them visible and precious. It’s a direct translation of the wabi-sabi worldview (finding beauty in imperfection) executed with the hyper-precision of French luxury.

The exhibition space itself refuses to be a typical white cube. Designed by architect Tsuyoshi Tane, the scenography treats the gallery as a living home – or an “artist’s house.” Lantern-like structures guide visitors through worktable environments and interior gardens, making the experience relatively more intimate.

This emphasis on inhabiting the space reflects a reverence for the long game. Guerrier speaks with genuine admiration for Japan’s ‘Living National Treasures’ – masters recognised for their lifelong dedication to a specific skill. It is a system that values the repository of knowledge within a human body over the final product. Even without direct collaboration for this specific series, that spirit saturates her work. In an age obsessed with the instant, her practice, and indeed the entire exhibition, acts as a cultural brake.

“I would like visitors to leave with a heightened awareness of gesture and the time it requires. That they perceive, beyond the forms, the sum of hands, skills and attention necessary for these works to exist,” says Guerrier.

“If something is to remain, it would be the idea that this exhibition is a living material. That behind each piece lies a story of shared gestures and transmission, which continues to live beyond the exhibition itself.”

‘Beyond Our Horizons: From Tokyo to Paris’ runs from 29 January to 26 April 2026 at la Galerie du 19M.

Discover more here.

photography. courtesy of Clarisse-Ain
words. Gennaro Costanzo

It is a bit of a cheek to ask who owns a circle, isn’t it? But for Adam Pendleton – the man currently occupying the high altar of American abstraction – it’s the only question worth asking. If you’ve spent any time in the world’s major galleries lately, you’ll know Pendleton as the architect of ‘Black Dada,’ a conceptual whirlwind of monochrome spray paint and layered history. 

Today marks the final curtain call for ‘Who Owns Geometry Anyway?’ at Friedman Benda gallery in New York. Since opening its doors on 7 November, this exhibition has seen Pendleton swap the frantic, spray-painted energy of his canvases for materials with significantly more gravity.

Speaking to the press, Pendleton revealed: “What is exciting and interesting about this exhibition is that the works being shown are ideas I had for a very long time, but had never given myself the agency to execute.”

Ranging from marble and onyx to granite and wood, these materials are transposed into what the gallery politely calls “functional forms,” though they feel more like altars than coffee tables. Take the aptly named ‘Boulder,’ a two-part marble work that doubles as a seat and a permanent tectonic shift.

This is also the artist’s first proper foray into furniture, and frankly, it makes a lot of contemporary design look a bit flimsy. Pendleton has taken the basic building blocks of the avant-garde – the triangle, the square and the circle – and realised them with a couturier’s obsessive eye. 

The ‘Extended Form’ series, rendered in both honey-hued onyx (‘Extended Form One’) and stark marble (‘Extended Form Two’ and ‘Three’), displays this perfectly. The detailing is exquisite: raised rims trace the edges of massive stone slabs, while legs taper into curves so precise they make the heavy black marble seem like it is levitating. 

There is a clever play on displacement too. In pieces like ‘Four Circles’ (crafted from granite) and ‘Split Form’ (marble), the geometry is punctuated by voids, as if he has simply reached into the stone and plucked the mass right out. It is not all cold stone, however; the ‘Two Circles’ (Studio Table) brings stained white oak into the mix, grounding the collection in something warmer, while ‘Drawn’ introduces a shock of modernity – a massive 180-inch loop of aluminium, silicone and LED light that cuts through the space.

Drawing on the philosophy of fellow American artist Isamu Noguchi (who famously said art should be “one with its surroundings”), Pendleton has turned the gallery itself into a ‘social form.’ Massive, hard-edged wall paintings, specifically ‘Black Triangle’ and ‘White Triangle,’ frame the installation creating an architectonic environment for the series of ‘Untitled’ glazed ceramic paintings that embellish the walls.

It has been a massive year for Pendleton. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) recently acquired his entire 35-work ‘Who Is Queen?’ exhibition in one swoop and he is currently dominating the Hirshhorn in D.C. with a major survey. But this New York show offers something rarer: a chance to see a master of two dimensions figure out how to conquer the third.

Find out more here.

photography. courtesy of William Jess Laird (featured), Izzy Leung, Matthew Septimus (portrait)
words. Gennaro Costanzo

Daniel Mercado is a creative working across photography, film and art. Driven by “curiosity, movement and a love for story telling in all forms”, he aims to capture fleeting moments that “live between elegance, emotion and identity”. Born and raised in Harlem, with Brazilian and Puerto Rican roots, Mercado brings a rich cultural lens to everything he creates, and travels often, “seeking out the spaces where identity and feeling collide”.

Using mostly acrylic pens and paint, French Moroccan artist Sophia Bounou creates works laden with patterns and characters, in both strong, saturated colour and more monochromatic palettes. She is inspired by Picasso, Modigliani, Basquiat and Miró.

Here, Mercado captures Bounou in her New York studio and recounts the experience of watching an artist at work.

“It was a quiet Thursday morning in Soho, the kind where the rain falls just enough to blur the skyline and the city feels like it’s holding its breath; the kind of weather that can weigh on you – unless you’re Sophia Bounou. Before I even reached the top floor, I heard her yell, ‘Sorry for the walk-up! It’s all the way on the third floor!’ She laughed and, at that moment, I knew this session would be something special.

“As I stepped into the studio, I entered a space that felt alive, with creative energy in every corner. With coffee on the table, brushes at the ready and my camera in hand, we got to work. Sophia found the perfect spot on the wall for a blank canvas, hammer and nails in hand. ‘Are these levelled?’ she asked. I looked up. They were flawless.

“It was clear I was in the presence of someone whose instincts were second nature. She chose her palette – deep browns, reds – and, without hesitation, began painting. There was no pause, no second-guessing. Her brush moved like water. It was a performance, but not one put on for show; it was internal, instinctual, like watching someone do what they were meant to do. Music blasted, we talked freely and nothing felt like noise. It was energy. It was momentum. She was in a flow state, unshaken by anything around her. In just over an hour, I watched an empty canvas become a physical reflection of her thoughts.

clockwise from top left. ‘Family’, ‘Friends’, ‘Home’

“Along the way, we shared stories, memories of her childhood, her relationship with her art, her journey. One story in particular that stuck with me was about her mother. Like many mothers, she supported her daughter, but she also saw her early creative sparks and encouraged her to stitch them into something bigger. The way Sophia’s characters came to life from old school doodles, collected and curated by her mom, spoke to the kind of support that shapes a person

“As she kept painting – layering colour, sketching shapes, letting her mind translate into form – I stepped back often to take it in, sometimes in silence, sometimes between changing film, but always watching her work with deep presence. It’s rare to witness someone that tuned in.

“Eventually, we wrapped. The art was done. Our time together had come to a close, but the impression of the moment lingers. Sophia is not only immensely talented – she’s generous, grounded and entirely herself. If there’s one thing I walked away with it’s this: let your imagination run, but don’t let it leave without you.”

Daniel Mercado: How do you discipline yourself?

Sophia Bounou: I saw a very interesting quote and it was like, “There will be days where you are unmotivated and you still have to do it. You’ll have these really tough days and you still have to get it done.” And, in my head, people have divorces and they still have to go to school or go about their life. I tell myself I have the privilege of creating [as] a job, so the least I can do is get my shit together, even if I’m having a bad day. Even on the stressful days, I just have to create. You can be talented but if you’re not putting yourself out there and giving it 110%, you won’t know what could happen. Some of the people who made it aren’t even the most subjectively talented but they just kept going!

DM: Are you ever stressed when painting? 

SB: NO! I love painting. I have a horrible attention span, maybe because of being Gen Z, and my phone. However, when I paint, I can do it for hours nonstop. I forget to eat and sleep, but it’s the one thing that calms my mind and there’s no challenge in my brain when I paint. I just go. I get into this hyper focused state.

photography + words. Daniel Mercado
artwork. ‘Brown World’ by Sophia Bounou