Top Picks from the Rencontres d’Arles 2025 | Chapelle Projects

Chapelle Projects shares its Top Picks from the Rencontres d’Arles, spotlighting standout artists orbiting just outside the official program. While some have already worked with Chapelle, others have long caught the agency’s eye. All are part of a new wave shaping the future of the French art scene.

The Miracle of the Sun, Marguerite Bornhauser & Marion Flament | Galerie Porte B & La Madeleine Arles

Both artists gravitate toward the heat of their respective mediums: one embraces photographic chemistry, while the other works with fire and glass. As a result, Bornhauser and Flament craft a shared mythology inspired by a mysterious early 20th-century miracle in Fátima, Portugal. Consequently, their collaborative works transform light into an active force that alters, shapes, and sculpts matter.

Louise Mutrel | Jardin d’Été

Mutrel photographs Japanese trucks as if they were architectural wonders. In particular, the glowing chrome, dense ornamentation, and bursts of neon turn each vehicle into a surreal, baroque portrait. Moreover, her tight compositions eliminate both road and sky, thereby transforming utility into rolling sculpture.

Nhu Xuan Hua | Galerie Anne-Laure Buffard, Hôtel de la Lauzière

Among the most immersive of our Top Picks from the Rencontres d’Arles, Nhu Xuan Hua creates a haunting, domestic mise-en-scène. Wallpaper absorbs and echoes memory; portraits float, floral patterns rupture scale, and the space itself seems to remember. It’s an experience suspended between photography and installation.

Caroline Corbasson | Lee Ufan Arles

With the delicacy of a wind researcher, Caroline Corbasson presents a series of works where breath becomes substance. For example, stretched veils, traces of breezes, and poems on canvas make air visible. In this context, the wind is not merely a subject but rather an invisible partner in a minimal choreography. This becomes especially clear in images captured in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, where, as a result of the wind’s force, sand-covered grasses etch fleeting traces onto the beach.

Formica | Galerie Regala

Formica isn’t exhibiting his work in a traditional white cube. Instead, he relocates his studio into the space. Inside Galerie Regala, the artist reconstructs his own workspace: a raw table, shelves stacked with sculptures, and daily drawings pinned directly to the wall. As a result, the viewer steps into a faithful fiction, suspended between archive and present. Within this simulacrum of intimacy, a raw intensity gradually emerges from his ceramic sculptures. Ultimately, they come together to form a multicolored mythological bestiary.

Interior Summer, with Deniz Bedir & Audrey Guimard, Curated by Casa Soler | Espaces Atypiques

The sun has entered, and it isn’t leaving. In this unconventional space run by Charlie Fau, Casa Soler installs a suspended summer that is at once hollow and luminous. On the walls, Deniz Bedir’s plaster works reveal a subtle yellow hue, much like a thermal vibration. Meanwhile, Audrey Guimard creates porous objects specifically designed to hold and inhabit heat. Rather than imitate summer, the exhibition constructs it entirely. As a result, we are gently and insistently carried through this imagined season.

Final Top Pick from the Rencontres d’Arles

In Praise of Shadow Maxime Testu | Graziella Semerciyan Gallery & Anne Carpentier

Depicting everyday objects that have fallen into disuse, Maxime Testu’s paintings inhabit Anne Carpentier’s home like benevolent ghosts. This exhibition, conceived as a dialogue between light and shadow in collaboration with Graziella Semerciyan, allows these still lifes to bridge the gap between rustic, regionalist painting and an abstraction reminiscent of the color-field movement. In this context, the works aim to neutralize items such as a clog or a bucket, which have become decorative objects far removed from the concerns of contemporary art. Here, we find ourselves outside of time and beyond any specific era.

Chapelle Projects’ Top Picks from the Rencontres d’Arles offer a glimpse into a parallel festival. It is one driven by intimacy, experimentation, and the quiet revolution of form.