From May 5 to June 20, 2026, the gallery invites Michel Jocaille for his first solo exhibition, entitled Lily of the Valley. The artist draws on lily of the valley—the flower of May Day—as a motif that is both tender and charged. A small white bell offered at the threshold of spring, it carries the memory of workers’ struggles as much as that of popular interiors.
Originally from the textile basin of Northern France, the artist weaves a dialogue between industrial heritage and cultural matrimony. To the factories respond gestures learned in the domestic sphere: from crochet to knitting looms to needlepoint. Repetitive, patient practices long relegated to the decorative, which the exhibition brings back to the center in order to conceive of textiles as traces of productive valleys. Glass captures fragility, and the motif repeats, like a heartbeat.
Michel Jocaille develops a practice of installation and sculpture composed of assemblages of heterogeneous materials. His work is rooted in a camp aesthetic that embraces artificiality, exaggeration, and a certain theatricality of gesture.
Drawing on references to fluidity and hybridity, the artist questions identity constructions and the normative narratives that underpin them. His approach articulates formal research with critical reflection, seeking to subvert hierarchies of value, blur systems of interpretation, and overturn imposed classifications. In doing so, he unfolds a visual thinking of the margins, attentive to the forms of power embedded in representations.
Between class inheritance and queer sensibility, Michel Jocaille composes a space where ornament becomes language. Lily of the Valley is not a commemoration; it is a presence—a way of holding together collective memory and intimate narrative, apparent softness and silent strength.
