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43 rue Saint-Georges
75009 Paris
France
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About
DNL gallery is a new gallery based in Paris, opening in March 2024. It is positioned as an exhibition, exploration and prospecting space dedicated to architecture in all its components.
The gallery aims to highlight the close links between the visual arts, media, contemporary culture and architecture, promoting their encounter and presenting their interactions. This is neither a confrontation between disciplines nor an eclectic selection, but a synthesis, a perspective that raises many questions. How do we select the pieces to be exhibited? Should the creative process be broken down? And what about references? Above all, how can architecture be collected?
To achieve its mission of encouraging these questions and fostering a better understanding of the built environment, the gallery will produce original works solicited from a new generation of architects, as well as selecting older works. While the most contemporary initiatives are exhibited, heritage and the history of architecture are by no means neglected.
The gallery is located in an apartment in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, offering an unusual setting for presenting architecture. An office, a living room and a storeroom will now be transformed into exhibition spaces to share architecture, its details, fragments and concepts with a specialised public, while seeking to reach as wide an audience as possible.
DNL stands for Double Neon Light, the leitmotif of exhibition spaces.
14 October – 21 November 2024
The exhibition at DNL gallery takes its cue from the Grand Tour, seeking to redirect our gaze towards a Paris that spills beyond itself. Through his itinerant, personal travels, the artist does more than depict buildings emptied of human presence: he draws us into the quiet dialogue he sustains with the architectures he encounters and before which he chooses to pause. What emerges is a painting of passage — of the fleeting glance cast at a building site or at a familiar, iconic structure — where the transient, the singular and solitude become subjects of study.
An architect by training, Boulben draws on the codes of his profession to re-enchant the urban landscape through painting. His works, made on timber panels salvaged from construction sites — OSB offcuts, samples of melamine-faced board and chipboard — are like fragments stolen from the city. Architecture acts as the site manager of the composition: through its format, its colours, its rhythms, its textures, it directs the building of the picture and the staging of its narrative.
Between Paris, Bobigny, Villejuif, Cergy and elsewhere, these urban situations, come upon in the course of a walk, are transfigured across seventeen small-format paintings. Architectural forms play with limits here, flirting with the frame without ever fully submitting to it. Like the Axe Majeur, these monumental constructions appear contained, yet the eye is always invited beyond the edges, towards what escapes direct vision.
From one painting to the next, we shift from the ordinary to the singular: a building site caught within the setting of the Bourse du Commerce, a building awaiting its métro, a church draped in scaffolding, twin towers turned into near-fetishised figures. These architectures become emblems of the hidden double the artist tracks across the city. What matters is not only what is revealed but what lies buried — an underlying duality in every painting: the built and the living, the intimate and the oneiric, the fixed and the fugitive, concealed beneath layers of paint, in the shadows, in details barely perceptible.
The paintings are shown on adjustable steel props, invoking construction — of the city, and of the work itself. Within this arrangement each painting becomes a window onto a fragment of space, suspended between the real and the imagined. Gridding the entire gallery, the props transcend the status of the picture: what is painting becomes almost sculpture, what is subject returns to volume.
Moving from painting to painting, the visitor retraces a route in the image of the Grand Tour, discovering a mosaic of urban scenes in which each work becomes a fragment of a larger whole, much like the city itself. In this wandering, it is our own solitude we meet. To play the game of the Grand Tour is to accept the idea of losing oneself, and of seeking in these architectures a fragment of the self.
Text written in close collaboration with Servane Martin, Marlène Simonessa and Charlotte Lourme
Alongside this career, Boulben has continued to paint and draw, taking his cues from everyday moments and from the incongruities of urban space. His works focus on scenes empty of human presence yet deeply rooted in the living and the emotional. He began with monotype, capturing interior scenes charged with meaning and memory — the bedroom, the bunch of flowers, the tube of toothpaste — before extending his practice to painting, drawing on the window as the privileged frame of the everyday, where architecture and nature intertwine, tending towards abstraction within figurative compositions.
Since then, his painting has been an attempt to build up layers with care, preserving the spontaneity of the first gesture and the trace left by the brush.
In December 2023, he exhibited a painting titled Panneau solaire n°1 in Montreuil and was awarded an acquisition prize.