Max Coulon’s Exhibition “L’un dans l’autre”

Max Coulon’s exhibition at Galerie Romero Paprocki in Paris

From April 30 to June 6, 2026, Max Coulon presents “L’un dans l’autre“, an exhibition that brings together a strange, almost theatrical assembly of figures. Part animal, part human, part architectural fragment, these sculptures seem to belong to a world that is both familiar and slightly off. They gather like a temporary community, awkward, humorous, and quietly unsettling, inviting viewers into a space where forms don’t quite behave as expected. 

Between Architecture and Instability 

Max Coulon’s work draws from architectural language (supports, ornaments, structural figures) but shifts it away from order and balance. In fact, his sculptures appear fragmented, reassembled, and subtly distorted. They seem to test their own stability, as if learning how to stand.

Working intuitively, he incorporates found objects, garments, and decorative elements, transforming them rather than treating them as fixed references. The result is a sculptural language where construction and disruption coexist.

Concrete and Transformation

One of the most striking aspects of the exhibition is Max Coulon’s use of concrete. Typically associated with stability and construction, here it becomes something far more ambiguous.

By casting concrete into soft molds (latex skins, pieces of clothing) the artist reverses expectations. Consequently, the material hardens into forms that retain the memory of something once flexible, even intimate. The result is not a clean reproduction, but a transformation: textures stiffen, shapes shift, and the body becomes both present and absent at once.

These works carry a physical tension. They are heavy, grounded, yet shaped by processes that introduce unpredictability. Each sculpture seems to emerge from a negotiation between control and accident, where the final form is never entirely predetermined.

Max Coulon’s World of Hybrid Figures

The exhibition is inhabited by a cast of hybrid beings: animals with unexpected appendages, anthropomorphic figures, and sculptural bodies that blur categories. These characters feel both playful and slightly uncanny, as if drawn from childhood imagination but filtered through something more complex.

Max Coulon brings together many different references. Elements from popular culture, architectural ornamentation, and everyday objects coexist within the same forms. Equally, a cartoon-like presence can sit alongside echoes of cathedral sculpture or classical motifs. “Humor seems to act as a binding force, allowing the contrast between lightness and discomfort to hold together,” explains Margaux Knight in the exhibition text.

Fragments and Scale

Alongside the larger concrete works, smaller sculptures in bronze and steel introduce another rhythm within the exhibition. Built from reclaimed decorative fragments, these pieces feel like condensed extensions of Max Coulon’s larger universe: hybrid forms where ornament, architecture, and figuration merge into compact, almost totemic compositions.

Holding Contradictions

At its core, “L’un dans l’autre” is about coexistence. In truth, Max Coulon’s practice resists fixed categories, moving fluidly between structure and body, humor and unease, control and accident. What emerges is not a single narrative but a field of possibilities, where materials and references continuously interact. 

The viewer is not asked to decode the work, but to navigate it, to move between fragments and construct their own reading of what holds everything together.

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Exhibition text written by Margaux Knight

Nature in the Concrete Jungle

An Assembly of Gestures