Mickaël Doucet

Poetics of Space, Paris, Lord Byron Editions, 2025

1st edition
Edition of 120 numbered copies from 1 to 120
Hardcover, 23 x 27.5 cm, 240 pages
Bilingual edition: English, Spanish
Translations by John Barrett, Stefan Gabriel, and Juan Álvarez Márquez
ISBN: 978-2-488446-09-9

Poetics of Space is the first monograph dedicated to the French painter Mickaël Doucet, tracing the course of his last ten years of creation. It includes a preface by Richard Leydier and various texts by Lars Jonathan Becker, Bernard Muntaner, and Christoph Tannert.

“Make no mistake, Doucet’s painting is not as restrained as it would have us believe. It is representation, that much is evident. It depicts an identifiable place, where one can discern the aesthetic intentions of an interior architect. But it is not restrained, because its representation mimics the unified perspective to which we are accustomed in classical painting. This perspective, invented during the Renaissance, sought to establish a ‘definitive’ way of representing reality with a single central vanishing point to which all lines converge on the horizon of a painting. It is not restrained either, like someone who would refuse to submit to the dictates of academic injunctions, or to a previously established, immutable plastic order of representation.” (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 has worked in the museum sector in Florence, where he also lived. Since 2019, he has been studying art history, history, and Catholic theology at the University of Frankfurt. To date, he has published two books. His texts also regularly appear in gallery catalogues and art history publications.

Richard Leydier is a curator, art critic, former editor-in-chief of the magazine Art Press, and current editor-in-chief of AVC magazine. In this capacity, he has written numerous monographs devoted to artists as diverse as David Altmejd, Bernhard Martin, Georg Baselitz, Vanessa Beecroft, and Ernesto Neto. He is the author of 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 Fine Arts, he holds an agrégation in plastic arts and has taught practice and image analysis at the University of Provence, where he directed the Department of Plastic Arts and Art Sciences. He served as director of the Regional Fund for Contemporary Art of the Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur region and organized numerous exhibitions in France and abroad. He also founded the editions bearing his name and the collection “Iconotexte” with the semiologist Jean Arrouye. He is also an art critic and curator, having contributed to numerous artists’ books and museum catalogues.

Christoph Tannert is a German art critic and curator. Born in Leipzig in 1955, he lives and works in Berlin. He studied art history and archaeology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, graduating with a Magister Artium 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. The 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 comprising studios and exhibition spaces. Since 1981, he has participated in curating and writing catalogues for numerous exhibitions on visual arts in general.

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 the Crag Gallery in Turin, the Virginie Louvet Gallery in Paris, the Diego Escobar Gallery in Marseille, and soon at the Damiani Gallery in Bari and the New Yard Gallery in Los Angeles. His paintings are held in many private collections in France and abroad.