AFAT: À l'échelle des rêves

20 November - 20 December 2025

Overview

Galerie CHENUS LONGHI is pleased to present its first solo exhibition dedicated to Toulouse-based artist Maxime Perboire, known as AFAT, who has emerged in recent years as one of the rising voices of the French contemporary scene.
AFAT paints with spray paint on raw linen canvases, depicting figures drawn in a single breath, in a deliberately naïve style that reconnects with the primal act of drawing. His figures — “neither men, nor women, nor children” — unfold across painting, drawing, and sculpture, through a vocabulary entirely built around the line.

The exhibition À l'échelle des rêves (At the Scale of Dreams) brings together in the gallery’s first room a new series of bronze sculptures, along with a selection of paintings and drawings that reveal AFAT’s sensitive and poetic universe.
For just over a year, the young artist has been developing a sculptural practice in close collaboration with a historic foundry based in Toulouse. The exhibition unveils a new ensemble of fifteen miniature bronze sculptures, organized around a central piece, accompanied by paintings on canvas and drawings on paper.

In his recent works, AFAT explores notions of scale, creative power, and perception, playing with contrasts between the miniature and the monumental. Inspired in part by the legend of Gulliver, the artist transposes this myth into his own world — that of the studio, turned into an imaginary island.
Here, the artist-giant faces his creations as if they were fragments of himself — autonomous, living presences that sometimes seem to escape his grasp.
Dream or reality? This tension evokes the figure of Geppetto, creator of Pinocchio, and the timeless question of the power to give life. Through these references, AFAT revisits the myth of the artist as a creator who brings beings into existence — beings capable, in turn, of existing beyond him.

His spray-painted works on raw linen extend this dialogue with sculpture, captivating the viewer with a distinctive “speckled” technique that creates an impression of lightness and freedom of movement. By drawing on popular myths and founding stories, AFAT enriches his artistic language with a new dimension — reminding us that every work, once created, begins a life of its own beyond its maker.