In painting, it can seem as though everything has already been said. Yet it is by no means certain that the future must lie in abstraction. In Paris, at Semiose, Mathieu Cherkit and Drew Dodge show how figuration can still be a territory for invention: the former starts from reality and makes it unstable; the latter constructs an imaginary world and gives it the substance of reality.
Tendrement and Earth-Pourers, both on view from August 29 to October 31, 2026, in the gallery’s two adjoining spaces on rue Quincampoix, bring together two generations and two very different approaches to painting.
Cherkit, born in Paris in 1982, starts with what he knows: domestic interiors, furniture, plants, gardens, objects and self-portraits. Everything is recognizable and yet, at the same time, something feels slightly out of place. Perspectives shift, planes overlap, and time and space seem to blur. The objects so often left scattered across the floors of his interiors also play a role: books, clothes and fragments of everyday life turn the floor into a visually active surface, seemingly tilting towards the viewer and intensifying the sense of instability running through the images. The home is not an orderly stage set, but a lived-in space. Dense and tactile, his painting remains viscerally figurative while also looking to art history, abstraction and Cubism. The everyday thus takes on an almost metaphysical dimension.
Drew Dodge, born in California in 2001 and now based in Brooklyn, takes the opposite path. Rather than starting from what he sees, he constructs a universe inhabited by hybrid creatures, part human and part canine, moving through water, lava, shifting skies and almost cosmic landscapes. His canvases bring together the spatial construction of Renaissance religious painting, the mysticism of the American desert and the visual freedom of cartoons.
In Earth-Pourers, the shell and its spiral become central motifs: for Dodge, they evoke time and memory, but also infinity and what might exist beyond the known. The same form seems to spread throughout the compositions, through intertwined bodies, waves, ropes, lava and skies.
The generational comparison becomes particularly interesting when viewed through the market. Cherkit, born in 1982 and already represented in numerous institutional collections, has works in the dossier priced between €2,900 and €40,000; Dodge, born in 2001, is already positioned between €12,800 and €33,500. Which raises an almost inevitable question: will it last? It is impossible to know today, but there is at least one reason for confidence: Semiose has clearly decided to invest strongly and consistently in the young American, supporting him through closely spaced solo exhibitions and sustained representation. Rather than a sudden acceleration in the market, his positioning therefore appears to form part of a deliberate gallery strategy. That a twenty-five-year-old artist has already come so close, in terms of pricing, to a painter with a far longer institutional trajectory remains one of the most striking aspects of the two exhibitions.
Semiose does not present the exhibitions as a single curatorial project. Yet their proximity inevitably invites comparison: Cherkit transforms what exists until it becomes almost unreal; Dodge invents what does not exist until it becomes believable. Reality and its opposite, both entrusted to painting.
Sabino Maria Frassà, August 22
VISITOR INFORMATION
Mathieu Cherkit – Tendrement
Semiose, 44 rue Quincampoix, 75004 Paris
August 29 – October 31, 2026
Drew Dodge – Earth-Pourers
Semiose, 42 rue Quincampoix, 75004 Paris
August 29 – October 31, 2026
