« Le secret des secrets », Paris

Woke up yesterday morning and took a selfie. Wanted to figure out whether the human species still needs mirrors now that we stare, scrutinize, and dissect ourselves through a camera and then a screen.
I saw myself, saw us, and in a second the whole world lost its mystery — tape over the front camera, and an immediate order for four mirrors. I’ll decide later where to hang them.

I called Maxime Bousquet, who’s curating the next group show at Sans titre, Le secret des secrets, on the theme of mirrors. I thought he surely must have felt the same unease I did at the idea of a world without reflection, without the ductile volume of a piece of glass staring back at us.
We talked for about an hour, and he offered to send me the PDF of the works he selected. Careful scrolling.

Maxime’s reference — a wicker mirror by Lina Zervudaki — gave me a first clue. The object is a fragmentation of the medium, a multiplication. Stand still in front of it; it’s a frame with an image, you own an instant self-portrait, a liquid, fleeting painting. Walk past it quickly and suddenly you’re a director, frame by frame. Throw a stone at it, rip the mirror out of its context, scramble organized shapes into chaos, and you might just end up a writer.

One of the great specialists of mirrors, decorator Serge Roche, covered furniture and everyday objects with plaster and glass — one stopping the gaze, absorbing light; the other rejecting it, scattering it. Playing with this double motif, Roche highlighted the mirror’s power as an extractor of the everyday. Here, Julien Monnerie works in the same register of form and matter, sculpting a pumpkin whose curved silver surfaces reflect its grooves and transform the vegetable into a Perrault-style carriage. Hamish Pearch, on his side, manipulates surface, lets spheres press their weight onto a strange margarine wrapper. A hydrophobic paper answering a heliophilic mirror.

In his Orpheus, Jean Cocteau mused: “I’ll give you the secret of secrets. Mirrors are the doors through which Death comes and goes. Look at yourself in a mirror all your life… and you’ll see death at work like bees in a hive of glass.” The lights you catch in a mirror are like two visions receding into distance and into time, like twin echoes, until they fade out. Léonor Fini sharpened this idea: a woman stares into the hollow eye sockets of her own skeleton; a macabre fast-forward stripped down by the delicacy of an ink line suspended in air. I’ll let you know if, later, in my new mirrors, I glimpse death staring back at me.

Some mirrors deform, spitting back another reality, erecting a new world inside their frames. Dozie Kanu’s reminds me of that — its undulating edges and coma pointed tips. By texturing the aluminum frame with a chromed paint, Kanu also corrupts the smooth surface of its glass, bending in his turn the mirror itself. The flat surface of a clear water was probably the world’s first mirror; Narcissus drowned in it for long hours. Daniel Steegmann Mangrané shattered that still pond by cutting it with a laser, metamorphosing water into polished steel, yanking the young man out of his death.

I was rereading myself when my screen went to sleep, forcing on me a reflection that looked like my own face. I cranked up the brightness and returned to those works.

The concept of the unreliable narrator exists in literature. Wayne Clayton Booth describes it as a narrator “out of line with the values of the work.” The mirror drags that concept into pictorial art. A piece of glass that shows a reality outside the diegesis of the work allows the lie to interfere inside it. Like the mirror on the wall of the Arnolfini Portrait, Inès Kivimäki’s video lies to us, throws back altered images, and finishes to close the loop on the unease I mentioned earlier.

We need one last reflection in our living rooms full of night.

Pierre Chpakovski

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Maxime Bousquet belongs to a new generation of Paris-based interior designers who are quietly yet decisively reshaping the global design landscape.

He has cultivated a language of his own — one that is unafraid to break conventions. His work blends precision with emotional resonance, balancing curated restraint with a sensitivity to atmosphere.

Collaborating with collectors, artists, and cultural figures, Bousquet embodies a contemporary Parisian sensibility defined by authenticity, harmony, and depth. From the transformation of historic apartments to the design of bespoke environments for art collectors, he creates spaces that are not only refined but also profoundly personal — places where architecture becomes the stage for living stories.