Heterotopia

The exhibition HETEROTOPIA shows works by French artist Mickaël Doucet (born in Blois in 1974).

Michel Foucault describes heterotopias as “other places”—real spaces that are simultaneously outside all places: mirror rooms, stages, gardens, inner worlds in which different times, orders, and realities are simultaneously present. In Doucet’s interior still lifes, these ideas find a powerful visual counterpart.

His spaces seem familiar – living rooms, niches, window axes, carpets, tables, plants, objects. And yet they elude clarity. Perspectives shift subtly, architectural lines condense into ornamental rhythms, geometric forms enter into dialogue with organic motifs. A radio, a book, a sculpture, an empty chair – each element seems to be the bearer of its own time. Past, present, and memory overlap.

Doucet’s interiors are not mere still lifes. They are spaces for thought – heterotopias in the Foucauldian sense: places of collection and displacement, of intimacy and distance. Spaces in which orders become visible and at the same time begin to falter.