Galerie Maubert presents, from 19 February to 4 April 2026, Philippe Gronon’s very first solo exhibition at the gallery. Marking the beginning of a new artistic collaboration between the gallery and the photographer, Manipulations brings together photographs drawn from several emblematic series and reveals objects bearing traces of use, trace, and displacement, placed at the service of an asserted pictoriality: work surfaces, technical devices, stage elements, and tools of transmission or transformation.

The title refers both to the everyday handling of these utilitarian objects—often invisible precisely because they are constantly in use—and, more implicitly, raises questions of image manipulation and the photographic act itself. Since the late 1980s, Philippe Gronon has developed a body of work based on a strict and consistent protocol, aiming for a rigorous, non-interventionist rendering of reality. Working either with a large-format camera or through digital scanning, he adopts a serial approach, framing generally flat objects frontally, at close range, always at a 1:1 scale, detached from any context. Safes, electrical panels, writing desks, developing trays, lithographic stones, or the backs of paintings are photographed without staging or illusionistic depth. The viewer is thus confronted with an image that asserts the full and immediate presence of its subject. 

This formal choice is accompanied by extreme attention to print quality. Long produced in black and white, and occasionally in color from the 2000s onward, the images seek to minimize subjective expressiveness in order to intensify the presence of the object. They adopt the exact dimensions of the photographed objects, reinforcing the impression of a direct confrontation between image and referent.

At the same time, Philippe Gronon’s practice highlights the constructed nature of all representation. Photography presents itself as a conventional object, situated within the space of art and fully assuming its status as a picture hung on the wall. This formalization, sometimes underscored by subtle interventions on the frame or margins, recalls that every image rests on a series of rules, adjustments, and decisions. The represented objects gradually detach themselves from their functional image; their visual presence asserts itself and opens up new fields of interpretation. A blackboard may thus become a painting—a fully pictorial surface, where the brush marks left in the chalk evoke gestural abstraction; the striking surfaces of matchboxes can be read as miniature pastels, revealing a form of lyrical abstraction; the multitude of multicolored threads crossing a transport cover turns into painterly splashes.

As the artist points out, these objects were always in use at the moment they were photographed: they go unnoticed precisely because they are being used. Isolating them, framing them, and bringing them to the scale of the image suspends their function in order to reveal their formal qualities, as well as the uses and gestures they bear. Respect for real scale, precision in framing and printing, invites close attention to detail while opening a reflection on what these surfaces reveal about human activities, working practices, and processes of thought. Some works thus take the form of meticulous records of inscription surfaces: writing desks, photographic trays, or worktables bear the marks of repeated gestures, erasures, and friction. These traces prevent any drift toward a disembodied abstraction; they inscribe the image within a concrete temporality, charged with use, history, and human practice.

The Versos series, initiated in private collections and later pursued in numerous institutions (Centre Pompidou, the Louvre, Musée Picasso, MAMAC, and the museums of fine arts in Dijon, Nantes, Amiens, Saint-Étienne, among others), occupies a central place in the exhibition. By photographing the backs of paintings—by anonymous artists as well as major figures from all periods—Gronon shifts attention to the work’s behind-the-scenes. Labels, inscriptions, stretchers, and traces of conservation or handling become material clues, offering another reading of art history: more factual, quieter, yet deeply revealing.

Taken together, these series testify to a sustained interest in transitional objects, whose very function destines them to disappearance. Their transformation into images suddenly brings them into view, conferring upon them an almost hieratic presence. The viewer is invited to scrutinize the smallest detail while questioning what these surfaces reveal—or conceal—about human activity, labor, memory, and creation. By extracting these objects from their functional context without ever transforming them, Philippe Gronon shifts them into another regime of visibility. Stripped of immediate utility yet bearing the marks of their use, they now exist as images, revealing their formal power and opening a space for reflection on the very conditions through which a thing becomes a work of art.