AUTONOMOUS OIL PAINTINGS // OBSERVATIONS: LE TROISIÈME EMPIRE

PEAU DE PARIS is a eulogy to the urban collage tradition of Nouveau Réalisme in homage to Jacques Villeglé, illuminating the cultural and creative consequences of an increasingly paperless society. As digital infrastructure rapidly overtakes the city, the tactile metro advertisements that are the lifeblood of affichiste practice, face an imminent threat of extinction. The present is poised to be the nostalgic past of what formerly constituted a physical archive of collective memory and urban expression, now endangered by digital erasure, as the printed skin of Paris will be replaced by the cold, temporal glow of screens.

In this series Keariene Muizz explores the city as a living body and the stratified surfaces functioning as skin which engages the layered life of Paris, both above ground and beneath the surface through discarded metro affiches, materials that circulate beneath the streets like vital organs, and transforms them into the dermis of her paintings, testifying to Paris's constant regeneration. The resulting works operate as both a time-lapsed portrait and biopsy as the advertisements mark temporary moments in the here and now that will never return. They examine what a city chooses to display and what it conceals beneath it's epidermis, not only where it gleams, but where it stretches, scars, and silently endures. In layering what is exalted with what is discarded, Muizz bridges Villeglé’s past with the Paris of her present, surface and structure, the tangible mascarons above the ephemeral, illusion and infrastructure.

Muizz’s approach acknowledges precedents such as Villeglé’s early affichiste practices, but diverges through intentional authorship: rather than presenting decay as artifact, she constructs a renewed surface. Her gilded brushwork and painterly overlays reference the luminous “face” of Paris above ground: the monuments, effigies, and curated splendor that form its public self. Graffiti-like gestures confront the formal discipline of oil paint, collapsing tradition into contemporary pulse. Through this merging of realms, the work reveals the energy circulating between the surface architecture and the subterranean networks that sustain Paris, forgotten sewage tunnels, intersecting metro lines, histories, and the suppressed psychological residues of daily life. Muizz’s paintings function as portals that translate these hidden currents into visceral encounters, resuscitating the posture of the city’s monuments while exposing the vitality of what lies beneath.

Her stabilization and reactivation of these urban remnants emphasizes preservation over erosion, a declaration that the fleeting narratives of everyday commuters deserve permanence.

   "To understand a city’s soul, one must trace its skin." —Keariene Muizz

Achieved with the aid of the RATP. The access granted by the transportation authorities of the Paris metro have made this collection characteristically distinct. The conventional canvased surface found in most paintings has been omitted entirely. Abandoning the constraints of cotton and linen fabric, she solely utilizes the large-scale affiches (advertisements) that adorn the organs of the underground. Localizing the context of memory by providing site-specific snapshots of Paris in real time through the conversion of temporal media into lasting works of art.

*Special Thanks to Skip Arnold, Mme Dozias, Mme Smalto, Aloïce, RATP, and the RATP workers who update the advertisements & their affiliates.