Mickaël Doucet

The Poetics of Space, Paris, Éditions Lord Byron, 2025

First edition
Edition of 350 numbered copies, from 1 to 350
Hardcover, 23 x 27.5 cm, 240 pages
Bilingual edition: French, German
Translations by John Barrett, Regine Herrmannsdörfer and Patrick Kremer
ISBN: 978-2-488446-13-6

The Poetics of Space is the first monograph devoted to the French painter Mickaël Doucet, tracing the evolution of his creative work over the past ten years. The book includes a foreword by Richard Leydier and essays by Lars Jonathan Becker, Bernard Muntaner and Christoph Tannert.

“Make no mistake—Doucet’s painting is not as restrained as it may initially appear. It is representational, certainly. It depicts a recognizable space, allowing us to perceive the aesthetic intentions of an interior designer. Yet it is not restrained, for its representational approach mimics the unified perspective we are accustomed to seeing in classical painting. This perspective—devised during the Renaissance—sought to define, once and for all, the depiction of reality through a single central vanishing point drawing all lines toward the horizon. It is not restrained either, in the way someone refuses to submit to the dictates of academic injunctions or an established pictorial order deemed immutable.” (Excerpt from the text by Bernard Muntaner)

Lars Jonathan Becker is a German writer and art historian. Born in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1999, he lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. He worked in the museum sector in Florence, where he also resided. Since 2019, he has been studying art history, history, and Catholic theology at the University of Frankfurt. He has published two books to date, and his writings frequently appear in gallery catalogues and art history publications.

Richard Leydier is a curator, art critic, former editor-in-chief of *Art Press* and current editor-in-chief of the magazine *AVC*. In this capacity, he has authored numerous monographs on artists as diverse as David Altmejd, Bernhard Martin, Georg Baselitz, Vanessa Beecroft, and Ernesto Neto. He has also written several books on Ronan Barrot, Marc Desgrandchamps, Jean Messagier, Jonathan Meese, and François Rouan, among many others.

Bernard Muntaner was born in 1945 in Marseille. A graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts, he is an agrégé in visual arts and taught image analysis and practice at the University of Provence, where he also headed the Department of Visual Arts and Art Sciences. He served as director of the Regional Fund for Contemporary Art (FRAC) in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region and curated numerous exhibitions in France and abroad. He also founded his own publishing house and the “Iconotexte” collection with semiotician Jean Arrouye. Muntaner is additionally an art critic and curator, having contributed to many artist monographs and museum catalogues.

Christoph Tannert is a German art critic and exhibition curator. Born in Leipzig in 1955, he lives and works in Berlin. He studied art history and archaeology at Humboldt University in Berlin, earning a Magister Artium degree in 1981. His areas of expertise include painting, photography, and video art. He co-founded the Brandenburgischer Kunstverein Potsdam in 1994 and became its vice-president in 2003. That same year, he was appointed to the board of the Berlin Photography Festival. Since 2000, he has directed the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, an international cultural centre and artists' residency with studios and exhibition spaces. Since 1981, he has curated and contributed to the catalogues of numerous visual arts exhibitions.

Born in Blois in 1974, Mickaël Doucet is a painter. He lives and works in Paris. Since 2014, his work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at Crag Gallery in Turin, Galerie Virginie Louvet in Paris, Galerie Diego Escobar in Marseille, and soon at Galerie Damiani in Bari and New Yard Gallery in Los Angeles. His paintings are held in numerous private collections in France and abroad.