Solo Show
Julie Navarro
Ce que veulent les fleurs
For its 8th participation in Art Paris, Galerie Wagner dedicates its stand to a selection of new works by artist Julie Navarro, who continues her research into perception, movement, and the vibration of colour. The series titled Ce que veulent les fleurs [act 2 – Les nymphéas] follows a sensory score blending edible flowers, music, and dance performed in 2018 at the Centre Pompidou.
Drawing freely on the Impressionist legacy — and more particularly on Claude Monet, whose centenary of death is celebrated in 2026 — Julie Navarro offers a contemporary reinterpretation in which the painterly mark becomes optical phenomenon and sensory experience.
The Gallery affirms an aesthetic outlook attentive to painterly practices that interrogate perception as both a mental and physical construction. Julie Navarro’s evanescent painting stages a tension between attraction and withdrawal, where the visible slips away — reveals itself — at the very moment it offers itself. The work becomes the site of a paradoxical experience: sensual in its materiality, speculative in its indeterminacy.
Indeed, like Claude Monet, Julie Navarro maintains an obsessive relationship with the play of light and the gentle movements of natural elements reflected in water. Their colour palettes converge around iridescent nuances of shifting, diaphanous materiality — entirely contemporary in Navarro’s case, as she remains keenly attuned to the energy of the living world, its connected flows, its human and non-human circulations, at the edge of the visible. Like him, she would like to “paint as the bird sings” — the sensations of mist, of landscape dissolving, of vibratory undulation, of what is immaterial par excellence.
Through this solo show, Galerie Wagner presents an immersive, fragmentary panorama composed of screen-paintings made from layered painted veils created in situ within the watery peatland landscape of the Creuse and in her Paris studio. Together they form a visual unity in motion whose perceptual effect in space overturns reality — like a mirror of water held up to the contemporary living world.
Florence Wagner, March 2026
Art Paris – Grand Palais – Galerie Wagner – Stand F1
Also of note: Julie Navarro has been selected twice over — for the Art Paris 2026 thematic programme “Babel – Art and Language in France” curated by guest curator Loïc Le Gall, and for the Prix BNP Paribas Banque Privée – Un regard sur la scène française 2026.
“Julie Navarro’s practice interrogates the way contemporary images are constructed from invisible systems. Through painting, she takes hold of the pixel — the fundamental unit of the digital image — not as a decorative motif, but as a genuine form of language. Her work explores the moment when the image ceases to be a surface and becomes a mobile, evanescent structure. The works are composed of repeated micro-units, organised according to logics akin to computation — from the addition to the subtraction of colours layered onto dance tulle. At a distance, they produce unstable, vaporous, almost atmospheric landscapes; up close, they fragment into a multitude of points or voids, revealing the discontinuity that underpins the digital image — more precisely, the screen-image. This tension echoes the analyses of Vilém Flusser, for whom technical images are constituted of coded elements belonging to a new visual alphabet that must be learned to read. In Navarro’s work, the pixel functions as a minimal sign, comparable to a letter, an ideogram, or a choreographic notation. This approach resonates with the thinking of Lev Manovich, who describes the digital as a cultural language structured by database, repetition, and modularity. Painting thus becomes a space of translation: it slows the digital flow and renders perceptible what ordinarily remains abstract. By reinscribing these logics within the materiality of the painterly gesture, Julie Navarro introduces a critical displacement. The pixel, so often associated with fluidity and instantaneity, recovers a density, a duration. The image is no longer merely seen — it is read. Her work thereby reveals that the digital has not replaced language, but has produced a new grammar of it: silent, calculated, omnipresent.”
Loïc Le Gall, Guest Curator, Art Paris Art Fair 2026
Prix BNP Paribas Banque Privée. Un regard sur la scène française
The Prix BNP Paribas Banque Privée. Un regard sur la scène française, launched in 2024 by BNP Paribas Banque Privée and Art Paris, recognises the career of a living artist from the French art scene. In its 3rd edition, this prize — endowed with €40,000 — will be awarded to one of the artists featured in the section dedicated to the French scene, conceived by Loïc Le Gall for Art Paris under the title Babel – Art and Language in France.
Practical Information:
ART PARIS
2026
9–12 April — Grand Palais, 28th edition 7 avenue Winston Churchill, 75008 Paris
Opening hours Public opening:
Thursday 9 April 2026: 12:00 – 20:00
Friday 10 April 2026: 12:00 – 20:00
Saturday 11 April 2026: 12:00 – 20:00
Sunday 12 April 2026: 12:00 – 19:00
VIP & Prestige badge holders vernissage: Wednesday 8 April 2026 (by invitation only): 11:00 – 21:00
Daily pre-openings for VIP, Prestige and Daily Preview badge holders: Thursday 9 to Sunday 12 April, each morning: 10:00 – 12:00
Invitations available upon request by email, subject to availability: contact@galeriewagner.com (please include your first and last name, email address and postal address)