Mickaël Doucet

Poetics of Space, Paris, Éditions Lord Byron, 2025

First edition
Edition of 30 numbered copies, from I to XXX, each accompanied by an original artwork by the artist
Hardcover, 23 x 27.5 cm, 240 pages
Bilingual edition: English, Spanish
Translations by John Barrett, Stefan Gabriel and Juan Álvarez Márquez

ISBN: 978-2-488446-12-9

Poetics of Space is the first monograph of French painter Mickaël Doucet, tracing the trajectory of his creative work over the past ten years. It includes a foreword by Richard Leydier, as well as various texts by Lars Jonathan Becker, Bernard Muntaner, and Christoph Tannert.

"Make no mistake, Doucet's painting is not as restrained as it might initially appear. It is representational, to be sure. It depicts an identifiable place, revealing the aesthetic intentions of an interior designer. Yet it is not restrained, because its representation mimics the unified perspective we are accustomed to seeing in classical painting. This is the perspective invented during the Renaissance, meant to definitively regulate the representation of reality with a single vanishing point drawing all lines toward the horizon within a painting. Nor is it restrained in the way someone would defy academic injunctions or resist a previously established and immutable order of representation." (Excerpt from Bernard Muntaner's text)

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 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. His writings also appear regularly in gallery catalogues and academic art history publications.

Richard Leydier is a curator, art critic, former editor-in-chief of *Art Press*, and current editor-in-chief of *AVC* magazine. In this capacity, he has authored numerous monographs devoted to a wide array of artists, including David Altmejd, Bernhard Martin, Georg Baselitz, Vanessa Beecroft, and Ernesto Neto. He has also published 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 School of Fine Arts, he holds an agrégation in visual arts and has taught the practice and analysis of images at the University of Provence, where he also led the Department of Visual Arts and Art Sciences. He served as director of the Regional Fund for Contemporary Art (FRAC) for the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, where he curated several exhibitions in France and abroad. He also founded the publishing house bearing his name and the "Iconotexte" collection with semiologist Jean Arrouye. Muntaner is an art critic and exhibition curator and has contributed to numerous 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 center and artist residency that includes 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 forthcoming shows at Galerie Damiani in Bari and the New Yard Gallery in Los Angeles. His paintings are part of numerous private collections in France and abroad.