04/06/2026
Discover ‘CURIOUSLY’, Javier Calleja’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, on view at Almine Rech Paris, Turenne until July 25, 2026!
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“I tried to do something new and I did the same, so now I do the same and it seems really new,” Calleja tells me — his works invariably described as featuring “characters with big eyes.” It is strange, because there is so much more, it seems to me, beyond those big eyes; yet they have come to stand in for the elusive strangeness of his work. Intimate, simple, immediate on the surface, his works are in truth extraordinarily complex and disorienting, never fully resolved. What they assert is less a univocal statement than a vehicle for reaching something less legible, deeper, perhaps inaccessible. They illuminate — even as they preserve their shadows — something seminal within us, something we reach for, ceaselessly, without ever quite arriving.
— Éric Troncy, art critic, curator, and co-director of Consortium Museum in Dijon, France
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Photos by Nicolas Brasseur
©️ Javier Calleja - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech
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