Antonin Katre: Lignes en friches

11 June - 11 July 2026

Overview

With Lignes en friches, Antonin Katre transforms the final room of the CHENUS LONGHI gallery into a space of architectural tension. At the crossroads of graffiti, photography, painting and installation, the artist continues his exploration of abandoned places and industrial ruins. Conceived almost like a vault-like space, the exhibition fully reveals the strength of a body of work in which the wasteland becomes a site of projected memory.

For more than thirty years, Katre has developed a practice shaped by urban exploration. Abandoned factories, deserted buildings and suspended structures form the raw material of his work. Drawing from black-and-white photographs, the artist introduces lines, colours, lettering and gestures, creating a dialogue between the memory of places and the energy of graffiti.

The title Lignes en friches encapsulates this approach. The lines are those of the photographed architectures — perspectives, metal structures, openings and vanishing points — but also those of the artistic gesture itself: rapid marks, bursts of colour and movements projected into the image. Painting cuts through the photograph, placing it under tension and revealing within the stillness of the site an energy that remains active.

The exhibition gives particular attention to the Babcock factory, a vast industrial site located in La Courneuve, which Katre has extensively photographed and from which he has preserved numerous paper archives. Plans, technical documents and images of industrial wastelands become worksupports in their own right. Mounted and recomposed, they open the architectural space to a more sensitive reading. With Lignes en friches, Katre reveals a body of work in which abandonment is never synonymous with stillness. The wasteland becomes a territory to reactivate, the blueprint a memory to displace, and the line a vector of movement between architecture, image and painting.

Exhibition from June 11 to July 11, 2026

Opening reception on Thursday, June 11 at 6:30 pm

CHENUS LONGHI Gallery

116 boulevard Richard Lenoir, Paris 11th arrondissement