Vernissage November 6, 2021 at 6PM
Exhibition Until December 3, 2021

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After reading Honoré de Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece, Julien Spiewak is stunned! Not only does everything in Balzac’s fantastical tale ‘speak’ to the photographer, but certain sentences – which he hastens to annotate – seem to have been written for him, referring closely to the images he has already created for his Corps de style series of photographs.

In the first part of this monographic catalogue, each double page features a quote from Balzac, taken from The Unknown Masterpiece, and a photograph taken by the artist in a museum, combining works of art and parts of the human body. In the second part, Julien Spiewak publishes the complete text by Balzac, with his annotations in the margin.

Dominique Baqué sees Julien Spiewak as ‘the happy version of Frenhofer, the mad old man who committed suicide’. For where Frenhofer fails, Spiewak succeeds in breathing life into art in two ways: by reviving Balzac’s text, with which he echoes and forms surprising elective affinities, and by bringing stylish interiors and museum spaces back to life with his flesh-and-blood bodies.