Galerie Maubert presents Perpétuel, Nicolas Muller’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, from April 11 to May 23, 2026.

This exhibition continues to explore the relationship between free forms and constrained gestures, this time situating it within the prison environment, with the underlying figure of the prison guard, an ambiguous figure—a link between inside and outside, at the crossroads of confinement and freedom. 

To create his drawings, Nicolas Muller follows precise protocols. The works in the Erased series are thus produced in two stages. First, he covers the entire surface of a very large sheet of paper hung on the studio wall with vertical lines. Using an architect’s ruler, he moves gradually, line by line, toward the right. He then proceeds to erase blindly, stopping only when the eraser has been worn down to almost nothing (for some drawings, he keeps the eraser shavings, which end up trapped between the paper and the glass of the frame). The series of A4 drawings he produces daily follows a different principle. Depending on his mood or desire, the artist makes a few marks, dots, lines freehand on the surface of the paper. He then draws a grid that collides with these small deviations, and whose final form in some way results from these initial improvised gestures, with whose traces he must contend in order to fill the sheet. Whether in verticality or horizontality, filling or erasing, precision or exuberance, the variations permitted around these two principles and within this range of gestures are infinite. One cannot help but observe the diversity of forms on display throughout the exhibition, a vast abstract landscape centered on what the artist describes as “the encounter between the norm and chance.” It organizes a progression that leads us from micro visual events to large formats which, with their soft, vegetal tones, almost recall certain floral compositions by Simon Hantaï.

Yet one would be mistaken to view this exhibition solely through the lens of process-based abstraction, or through frameworks borrowed from the strict protocols of conceptual art. For it may be, first and foremost, in the depths of the artist’s life that his drawing practice is rooted. Nicolas Muller, whose father was a prison guard, spent his childhood and adolescence in penitentiary environments. He roamed their exterior spaces, confronted their enclosing walls daily, measuring the gap between inside and outside, sometimes finding in the garden of the staff housing where his family lived packages catapulted from the outside to prisoners within. His visual and spatial education was, in short, shaped by this environment. Far from being anecdotal, this biographical fact radically transforms, once known, the way one reads both his forms and the protocols he follows.

It naturally gives the exhibition’s title another resonance, shifting us from a meditation on the artist’s fate at work, caught in the Sisyphean repetition of his gestures, to the perpetuity of a confinement that is no longer metaphorical. We then understand that the vertical lines form other enclosing walls, while the principles of containment, adherence to norms, or conversely deviation, invite a Foucauldian reading of these abstractions, one that reflects on the alliance of control and surveillance that, for the philosopher, characterizes the functioning of institutions. This strong connection to the penitentiary world also reconfigures the symbolic value of the tools used by the artist: the eraser, correction fluid, and bleach he uses to discolor the paper and achieve the “marsh green” tone of certain drawings all point more broadly to a meditation on the material environment of French public institutions, as canteens, with the smell of chlorine, overcrowded classrooms, concrete schoolyards (whose trace we literally find in the discreet bronze sculptures placed on the floor, created as part of a public commission in a school).

Nicolas Muller readily cites Annie Ernaux. The reference makes sense, a great deal of sense: in their works one finds a similar refusal of lyricism, a formal simplicity bordering on austerity, and of course a shared awareness of relations of domination. But unlike the author, who cultivates an open and unselfconscious relationship to her own history, the artist has so far chosen to maintain a discreet distance from his personal trajectory, and to delegate all expressive power to abstract forms.

Jill Gasparina

Curator and art critic