Inès Longevial, In Your Pocket: KETABI BOURDET - 22, PASSAGE DAUPHINE 75006 PARIS

A painting small enough to fit in the hand, be handled or carried around. The body of work presented is the result of an ongoing practice pursued by the artist over the past four years, during which these small-format paintings have gradually accumulated in her studio. By radically reducing the scale of her works, the artist transforms our physical relationship with painting: the painting is no longer simply a surface one stands in front of, but a personal, almost intimate object, its format recalling that of the mobile phone we now constantly hold in our hands. 

These small canvases feature faces, but also fragments: an eye, a mouth, a breast, feet... The body, omnipresent in Inès Longevial’s work, is here subjected to framing. It is presented in fragments, until certain body parts become almost abstract, as in Femme 3, where a female sex becomes a simple abstract form within a colourful landscape. Alongside these fragments are several portraits, in which the face temporarily regains its unity.

These fragments come from the artist’s own body as well as those of other people, forming a repertoire of shapes and features from which she draws to create new figures. Inès Longevial therefore does more than deconstruct faces: she constructs new ones. An eye may be paired with a mouth that did not belong to it; the paintings are brought together, separated and exchanged to reveal hybrid physiognomies. This process allows her to deliberately move beyond self-portraiture, despite its central place in her work: the “I” becomes one material among others, merges with other identities and ceases to be the sole origin of the face. The exhibition thus becomes a performance: throughout its duration, these associations will change. The small paintings will be moved and recombined, successively producing different faces, while the body becomes alternately feminine or masculine. No composition is definitive. A painting can take on a different role depending on the one beside it; a fragment retains its autonomy while becoming part of a new whole.

This construction of the face resonates with what Gilles Deleuze calls “faciality”: the face understood not as a natural or stable given, but as a construction, a system that produces meaning and can, in turn, be undone. In Inès Longevial’s work, the face is precisely never given once and for all. It emerges through assemblage, comes apart when a fragment is moved, and then reappears in a different form. Deconstructing the face thus becomes less a way of destroying it than of questioning how it is constituted, and everything we project onto it in order to recognise an identity.

The resulting body inevitably brings to mind René Magritte’s L’Évidence éternelle, which as early as 1930 fragmented the female body across five distinct paintings. Yet this fragmentation takes on a contemporary resonance here. Observed, framed, commented on, desired, judged, corrected: women’s bodies remain subject to a multitude of gazes and injunctions that constantly seek to define their shape, use or representation. By choosing to cut up bodies, then move and recompose their fragments, Inès Longevial seems to reverse this mechanism. Is it through fragmenting the body that she helps free it from the gaze that seeks to fix it? Rather than submitting to the frame, she constructs it; rather than allowing the external gaze to fix an image, she makes it unstable, mobile and impossible to determine definitively. The body no longer appears as a whole to be judged or controlled, but as an open territory whose contours the artist can continually redistribute.

This logic of fragmentation and recomposition finds its counterpoint in Small but giant, a self-portrait of the artist lying down, viewed from above and surrounded by some of the exhibition’s small paintings. The image thus contains the very images that, elsewhere, decompose it. Imposing in scale, the work becomes a kind of matrix: a body around which its details, doubles and possible recompositions revolve. It is also the artist at the heart of her studio, surrounded by her canvases — often self-portraits — each a variation of herself.

In Your Pocket thus unfolds between fragment and totality, movement and extended time, like a mapping of the system that is our face. The small format of the canvas carries the intimacy of a photograph once kept in a wallet, while

echoing the thousands of images we now carry on our phones: faces, bodies, details, memories — always in our pocket.

In Inès Longevial’s work, these images become objects once again. They can be moved, brought together, stacked and hidden. And because they can continually change position, a face is never entirely fixed: it remains one possible image among others, as though this very impossibility of being fixed were precisely what makes it profoundly human.