By the time you meet Joris Ghilini, you’ve already walked past the usual suspects—gleaming canvases, conceptual sculptures, and sleek installations arranged with the careful sterility of a gallery catalog shoot. Then you arrive at his corner, and suddenly everything feels like it’s been through something.
Ghilini stands beside a collection of paintings that look like they’ve survived a fire, a flood, and maybe even a war. Their origin is unmistakable—Picasso, or something that once resembled it. “I present some painting during this art fair as old Pablo Picasso or something who you can recognize immediately,” he says, his French accent curling around the English words. “And I rebuild completely and I destroy… in order to show something in a different way than we are used to.”
To Ghilini, art isn’t a precious object to be revered behind glass—it’s something to be broken, questioned, reassembled. His paintings are part sculpture, part resurrection. Fluorescent paint bleeds across fractured wooden surfaces. Metal limbs brace broken frames. There are numbers stenciled across the works, like cryptic inventory tags from some imaginary museum of lost things.
“The number is for asking another question,” he explains. “It’s like an old inventory. The pieces are deplaced… lost, and we can refine it with this special number.” He calls it an “imaginary inventory,” a poetic filing system for chaos. Each piece seems suspended between past and present—iconic yet undone, fragile but pulsing with color.
Ghilini doesn’t just paint on the front of a canvas. He treats both sides like distinct worlds—two lives of the same soul. “Every work has a front and a back,” he says. “Because I paint on both sides, and it permits me to present my painting on the wall, or on the floor, or on the desk—as a sculpture, in fact.”
At the fair, he’s installed his work as “after” Renaissance masters like Domenico Ghirlandaio and François Clouet, creating an unlikely dialogue between 16th-century oil and 21st-century wreckage. The effect is jarring and intentional. “I choose to contrast the two universes,” he says. “To speak about the same thing—about time, and the destruction of everything: society, culture… everything is fragile.”
In one of the pieces, a young face stares out beneath cracked paint and spectral overlays. “It’s a portrait of François Premier as a child,” Ghilini says. “And Isabelle d’Autriche. Famous people as children.” But here, they are no longer just figures from history—they’re part of Ghilini’s spectral world, caught between memory and reinvention.
Even the flowers in his installation—ones usually stapled to the backs of his canvases—have been pulled forward, laid bare for viewers. Nothing is hidden, nothing spared. “It’s about showing the reverse,” he says, “the unseen side.”
In a fair full of polished perfection, Ghilini’s work feels like a challenge. To tradition. To time. To the very idea of preservation. “We are used to seeing everything in perfect condition,” he says. “In the perfect place. But that’s not how things really are.”
