Galerie Carpeaux presents A Sitting Poetry, an exhibition by Jean Clavel.
In 2024, Jean Clavel got on a motorbike and rode more than 20,000 kilometres across mainland Greece, from the Peloponnese to Epirus, from Kalavryta to Pelion. He had no defined subject at the outset. The subject imposed itself: chairs. Found everywhere facing the sea, leaning against façades, abandoned in courtyards they were photographed exactly where they stood, in their raw presence. Each one is a character. A silent portrait. They speak of absent presence, of waiting, of memory.
Following the success of the inaugural exhibition in Athens in September 2025 — acclaimed by the Greek press (Kathimerini) — A Sitting Poetry comes to Paris, at Galerie Carpeaux, from june 25 to 28th 2026. The exhibition is largely devoted to the A Sitting Poetry series and opens with the first public presentation of a new work in progress, dedicated to the movement of water.
A Sitting Poetry is a series of black-and-white silver gelatin photographs devoted to the chairs of Greece. Figureless silhouettes, mute presences, these chairs become discreet witnesses at the crossroads of memory, absence and imagination. Each one, apparently ordinary, is transformed into an interior landscape, a fragment of narrative, an absent presence that invites the gaze to immerse itself in suspended time.
Each chair was encountered in its state of appearance, without staging, without displacement. This fidelity to the raw presence of things is at the heart of the approach. The collection comprises approximately 250 photographs; some fifty will form the core of the forthcoming book.
Jean Clavel is a Franco-Swiss photographer born in 1995. Trained in economics, he discovered photography in 2015 during a university exchange in Buenos Aires, borrowing his mother’s film camera the same one she had used for a reportage in Lebanon in 1982.
He trained in silver gelatin printing with Stéphane Cormier (the reference printer for Depardon and Salgado) at his laboratory on rue Taylor in Paris, and with Elias Cosindas in Greece. His practice has been shaped by the guidance of Jean-Noël De Soye (galerie In Camera) and photoreporter Mathieu Garçon.
He works exclusively in black-and-white film, with a Leica M7 and a Mamiya 645 Pro TL, mastering the entire image cycle from capture to silver gelatin print. In 2024, he settled in Kypseli (Athens) and rode through mainland Greece by motorbike for his second series, A Sitting Poetry. He lives today between Athens and Paris.
Jean Clavel : A Sitting Poetry
Thursday 25 to Sunday 28 June 2026
Galerie Carpeaux
3 rue Carpeaux
75018 Paris
www.lefunambulenomade.art
@lefunambulenomade
Opening: Thursday 25 June 2026, from 5:00 pm
11:00 am – 9:00 pm
