The French scene showcase stands as one of the defining moments of Art Paris 2026

Twenty artists. Twenty galleries. One obsession: the sign. The thematic showcase Babel – Art and Language in France, curated by Loïc Le Gall, emerged as the most intellectually ambitious proposal of Art Paris 2026 — a journey through language at a time when words circulate everywhere and mean increasingly little.

There is something vertiginous about entering a space where words have lost their self-evidence. That is precisely the invitation Art Paris extended this year through its French scene showcase, titled Babel – Art and Language in France — a mental and sensory journey through the cracks, mysteries and powers of the sign in contemporary art. In a world saturated with feeds, slogans and content, twenty artists made the opposite choice: to slow down, unfold, dismantle language in order to truly look at it.

— The Tower and Its Many Voices

The reference to Babel is no rhetorical flourish. It is programmatic. What Loïc Le Gall — director of the Passerelle Centre for Contemporary Art in Brest and former curator at the Centre Pompidou — assembled here is not a manifesto about a style or a generation. It is a cartography of tensions inherent to French contemporary art whenever it engages with language.

“Art is a laboratory where language forms are observed, unfolded, sometimes subverted, and often reinvented.”

Loïc Le Gall, Curator of the Babel Showcase

Tensions between letter and image, between intelligibility and opacity, between inheritance and invention. Some artists probe the raw materiality of the sign — the weight of a letter engraved, traced, printed, placed on a surface like a body laid down. Others explore translation as a space of simultaneous loss and gain. Others still inhabit the multiplicity of alphabets, or trace the journey of words through digital networks — these new towers of Babel where everyone speaks and no one truly listens.

— A Transgenerational Panorama

The selection is deliberately transgenerational. It summons tutelary ghosts: Jean Dubuffet with his Hourloupe — that unclassifiable graphic system hovering between writing and abstraction — presented by Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger; Isidore Isou, father of Lettrism, whose 1986 Lettrist Composition recalls that France’s great adventure with the sign has its roots in the post-war years; Ben Vautier, whose piercing I Am a Work of Art (1982) remains a provocation of devastating clarity; and Marcel Jean, Surrealist figure, completing this historical arc with his tribute to Toulouse-Lautrec.

But Babel is no imaginary museum. It is also — above all — a space of living creation. Alongside the historical figures, the works of Laure Prouvost, Fabrice Hyber, Anne-Marie Schneider and Fabienne Verdier remind us that contemporary French art possesses a depth of invention rarely celebrated at its true worth.

— The French Scene Is Diasporic

Then there are the voices that come from elsewhere — French by anchorage, but shaped by other geographies of meaning. And it is here that Babel takes on its full contemporary dimension. Joël Andrianomearisoa, Malagasy artist based in Paris and presented by Almine Rech, whose work SANS FIN LE SILENCE DANS LA LUEUR UN SOLEIL ABSENT (2025) transforms words into an emotional score. Sara Ouhaddou, whose practice navigates between Berber ornamentation and the codes of modernity. Mireille Kassar, whose Reveries of Gilgamesh invoke one of humanity’s oldest narrative ancestors.

These presences are not incidental. They say something essential about the current state of creation in France: the French scene in 2026 is a diasporic scene — plural, traversed by multiple memories and multiple alphabets. Babel does not merely illustrate this: it makes it a coherent aesthetic and intellectual proposition.

SELECTED ARTISTS

Artist	Gallery
Juliette Agnel	Clémentine de la Féronnière
Joël Andrianomearisoa	Almine Rech
Jean Dubuffet	Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger
Léo Fourdrinier	Les filles du calvaire
Fabrice Hyber	Galerie Nathalie Obadia
Isidore Isou	Galerie Patrice Trigano
Marcel Jean	Galerie Boquet
Mireille Kassar	Saleh Barakat Gallery
Elias Kurdy	Dilecta
MC Mitout	Galerie Claire Gastaud
Tania Mouraud	Galerie Claire Gastaud
Julie Navarro	Galerie Wagner
Sara Ouhaddou	Galerie Polaris
Laure Prouvost	Galerie Nathalie Obadia
Luca Resta	Yvon Lambert
Anne-Marie Schneider	Michel Rein
Ernest T.	Semiose
Camille Tsvétoukhine	Loevenbruck
Ben Vautier	Galerie Catherine Issert
Fabienne Verdier	Galerie Lelong

— The BNP Paribas Prize: A Structural Support Model

Running as a common thread through the showcase, the third edition of the BNP Paribas Banque Privée Prize — A Look at the French Scene, endowed with €40,000, underscored the institutional ambition of the entire device. Awarded at the opening by a jury of leading figures from the art world, the prize offers its laureate international visibility and direct support to their gallery.

KEY TAKEAWAY

An Intergenerational and Economically Structural Model

By articulating historical creation and contemporary emergence, Art Paris and BNP Paribas Banque Privée propose a support model that does not consume artists — it inscribes them in duration. In doing so, they also valorise the work of galleries as full economic actors within the cultural value chain.

— What Babel Tells Us About Ourselves

One leaves the showcase with a conviction: language is in crisis, and that is precisely why it is so fertile. These twenty artists do not respond to the saturation of signs with silence — they respond with precision, complexity, and assumed ambiguity. It is a stance that is at once artistic and, in a certain way, political: to refuse the self-evidence of words is to refuse that reality be reducible to what is said of it.

For actors in the African and Caribbean creative economy, this showcase also offers a lesson in method: the plurality of languages, origins and memories does not weaken an artistic project — it constitutes its strength. Babel, at Art Paris 2026, is not confusion. It is abundance.

FURTHER READING

The Babel – Art and Language in France showcase gave rise to a complete catalogue, available at bookshops and on artparis.com. Art Paris 2026 was held from April 9 to 12, 2026, at the Grand Palais, Paris.Tags: Art Paris  ·  French Scene  ·  Creative Economy  ·  Diaspora  ·  Grand Palais  ·  Contemporary Art