The enigma of everyday life

A silent city becomes a stage, and urban solitude becomes visible amidst buildings and fleeting figures. This is the key to the experience offered by Bilal Hamdad at his exhibition Paname at the Petit Palais, where large-scale oil paintings on canvas transport the viewer to the heart of the metropolis, capturing those solitary presences that escape the hustle and bustle of the city. A self-taught artist who trained at the Sidi Bel Abbes School of Fine Arts and then at the Paris School of Fine Arts, Hamdad creates a style of painting that stems from live photography: Parisian scenes, often captured in a snapshot, become paintings in which anonymous figures emerge as mirrors of contemporary isolation. The contrast between the urban crowd and the solitary individual becomes powerful and emotional in large-scale works. The exhibition features around twenty selected works, including two new paintings created specifically for this occasion, which dialogue with the museum's permanent collection. Hamdad reflects on Old Masters such as Rubens, Manet, and Courbet, weaving references into his own language. In Miroir des Astres (2024), one perceives a baroque elegance, while Sérénité d’une ombre (2024) echoes the composition of an inanimate still life, with references to Manet. The result is an invitation to look anew, to see the city not as a backdrop, but as a place of internal tensions and daily enigmas, where solitude becomes a lens through which to interpret the paradoxes of our time. The exhibition was curated by the Director of the Petit Palais, Annick Lemoine, with the scientific supervision of Sixtine de Saint Léger, and created in collaboration with the Galerie Templon.