Galerie Maubert presents Plan, patron, patronnage, a solo exhibition by Nicolas Daubanes, from May 30 to August 1, 2026. Bringing together a body of drawings made with iron filings, alongside photograms and new installations, the exhibition stems from several recent residencies (notably at Villa Medici, Maison Salvan, and across ten major French national memory sites), as well as major exhibitions, including at the Panthéon and the Musée de l’Armée, all of which have shaped the artist’s practice over the past two years.

JB : Here, we refer to three successive stages in garment-making: first, the conception of a “plan,” a guide drawn on paper; then the cutting of this guide at full scale, 1:1, into a “patron” (“pattern,” but also in French the employer or authority figure), preparing the transition from paper to fabric; and finally “patronage” (“pattern cutting”), which consists of cutting the fabric according to the pattern’s outlines—without following them exactly. One must cut slightly wider around its lines, leaving room for the future gestures of sewing, which will later define the garment’s edges more precisely.

ND : What is compelling is that each of these successive stages introduces an increasingly significant margin of interpretation. The final stage, the act of patronage, is about adapting the order you have been given. It means that between the ‘‘patron’’ and the worker, it is the one who handles the material who has the final say. [1]

Cutting residues constitute the raw material of Nicolas Daubanes’s works: first, steel dust gathered from the floors of factories encountered throughout his travels; then incandescent steel particles produced through his own grinding gestures; and, in his photograms, the surplus light generated by that same action.

These cutting residues materialize the narrow margin left to the worker’s gesture in shaping an object. A margin of the slightest kind—barely a few filings, akin to dust. Yet beware of such dust should it reach your eye.

It is from this kind of margin that the images and narratives presented here are formed.

Beginning with a cypress tree (Cypress Hill, 2026), rising like an arrow toward the sky. To create it, the artist deploys the full plastic potential of magnetized steel powder, sliding it across the surface. The work traces the trajectory of a mass of powder thinning as it rises skyward, echoing the way cypresses grow on graves to accompany the souls of those denied access to the cemetery.

Nicolas Daubanes thus produces scenes situated between two worlds. Often at the boundaries of reality and dream, sometimes tinged with phantasmagoria, yet always describing the very real borders established within our societies. The mutiny at Fontevraud Abbey draws upon the codes of the imaginary and the traits of Francisco Goya (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters) to evoke the horde of fantasies and nightmares suspended at the threshold of the courtroom where prison discipline was once exercised during the abbey’s penal era. This scene, like so many others presented here, appears suspended—not only through the vibratory appearance of the grains composing the drawing, but because it exists on the verge of collapse and eruption: constantly keeping us at the threshold of the event.

If the historical subjects the artist explores seem to emerge from an in-between world, it is likely because he approaches them as events: that is, moments when something is happening but has not yet been named. Sometimes through lack of time, sometimes by deliberate omission. Such is often the case with the scuttling of the French fleet at Toulon on November 27, 1942, carried out by the Vichy regime to prevent its capture by an enemy alternately described, depending on the narrative, as Resistance or Nazi. Indistinction here takes the form of a troubled sky, agitated by the traces of a fire without ashes: a fire of powder and steel. Through his photographic techniques, the artist fractures the horizon and waterlines surrounding the ships. Their image emerges beneath a sky in fusion, besieging everything—even the genius of navigation. We witness the suspended moment of blinding confusion.

When one chooses to move through historical facts at this moment of unnamed indistinction, they become sites of all predictions. This is the case with the sugar-added concrete works, recalling practices of ex-voto and haruspicy. At their core, a red-tinted sugar crystal simultaneously foretells plunder and wound, without revealing victor or vanquished. From where we stand, anything may still happen. Elsewhere, The Fall of Marcus Aurelius’ Column reenacts the destruction of the Vendôme Column by the Communards, relocating it as a possibility that can never be entirely excluded. Each work thus opens a space for hope and for the risk of upheaval, for the disaster of collapse or the horizon of victory—in other words, the space of a margin left to the gestures of both artwork and History.

From Antiquity to the most recent conflicts, Nicolas Daubanes engages fragments of History before they have been fully qualified, as though to reveal the possibility of another outcome—positioning his gaze on those who carry out the work, rather than those who draw the plans. Thus, the artist reproduces at full scale an authentic wooden game piece used by Napoleon Bonaparte to develop military strategy, yet transforms it into precious dental ceramic, recalling the bodies sent into battle through the mere displacement of a pawn upon a plan. It was also Napoleon Bonaparte who exchanged the Palazzo Mancini for the Villa Medici to establish the French Academy in Rome. Nicolas Daubanes invites us to scrutinize from within the body of this building—where years, power, and art have sedimented—through the form of a staircase whose helicoidal structure evokes both a spine and a DNA molecule.

Beyond a quest through the margins of History, during his residency year at the Villa Medici, the artist also sought interstices within the institution itself and its many representations. How does one find something there that has not already been seen, not already narrated? How can one still detect a mystery, even one no larger than dust?

In this search, it was necessary to turn toward what had been obscured within these walls. Chief among them was the gaze of Galileo Galilei, and the window through which he observed each evening the expanse of a dazzling yet inaudible truth during his Roman trial in 1633. Thus, the moving sky above Rome pierces the very heart of the building, extending even into the loggias once painted by Diego Velázquez—with an added mystery: a new light, born from residues and dust.

Juliette Belleret

Author and Curator

[1] Excerpt from the interview featured in the text “Shared States of the Body” in Le passage au dessin : reprise, transfert, mise au point (dir. Anne Favier)