Nemo: Hommage à l'artiste
Five years after Nemo's passing, this tribute exhibition marks the beginning of a collaboration between Galerie Chenus Longhi and his family, initiated with his son, Olivier Faurie, and his granddaughter, Noa. It opens a new chapter dedicated to preserving, documenting and bringing renewed attention to a body of work deeply rooted both in the history of French urban art and in the collective memory of Paris and its suburbs.
Drawn from the collection preserved by the family, the exhibition brings together around fifteen original works, some of which are now being made available for the first time, alongside an exceptional selection of sketchbooks and travel journals. Preparatory drawings for murals — both those that were realised and those that remained at the project stage — together with studies, notes and reflections offer an intimate insight into a creative process that the apparent simplicity of Nemo's visual language might otherwise suggest was entirely spontaneous.
These documents take on particular resonance given how inseparable Nemo's work is from the places in which it was created. For nearly forty years, Belleville, Ménilmontant, eastern Paris and Seine-Saint-Denis were his territory of expression. A sealed doorway, a damaged façade, a construction hoarding or a piece of road infrastructure could become the starting point for a story. His black figure walks, falls, waits, travels or takes flight; around him, a red balloon, an umbrella, a suitcase, a few animals or flowers are enough to bring a narrative to life. With a remarkable economy of means, Nemo created an instantly recognisable language infused with movement, childhood, freedom, solitude and a sense of gentle melancholy.
Fiercely independent and uncompromising, Nemo always kept his distance from the art market and never sought to position his practice within the gallery circuit. The original works that remain are therefore particularly rare, often created on found or reclaimed materials. He nevertheless shared a studio for many years with Jérôme Mesnager, with whom he produced numerous collaborative works, and occasionally took part in major gatherings that accompanied the revival of stencil art and the growing recognition of urban art throughout the 2000s.
Showing Nemo's work today carries a particular emotional weight. Many of the walls he once inhabited have disappeared or been transformed; others still bear traces of his presence. Through them survives the memory of a territory, its inhabitants and a working-class Paris for which his black silhouette became a familiar landmark. This exhibition seeks to initiate a process of transmission: preserving the works and archives, documenting interventions that have disappeared or remain visible, and enabling a new generation to appreciate the singularity of his work.
This initiative also continues the gallery's longstanding engagement with the history of stencil art. Samantha Longhi has studied the movement since the late 1990s: a graduate of Paris-Sorbonne in 2001, she organised the exhibition and gathering Paris Pochoirs at 59 Rivoli in 2003, led the curatorial project Stencil History X from 2007 to 2010, and published numerous articles and books on the movement, culminating in Paris Pochoirs, published by Éditions Alternatives in 2011. More than twenty years after her first collaboration with Nemo, this new project developed with his family thus continues a longstanding commitment to researching, preserving and advancing the recognition of this history.
