JOHAN CRETEN BUILDS A WALL FROM HIS FATHER'S COMPUTERS

Johan Creten's wall of computers is not sculpture in the usual sense. It is inheritance, stacked. Dozens of machines his father collected across four decades sit screen dark, case yellowed, mounted at the center of Les Chiens de Pavlov, Creten's solo show at Perrotin's Marais gallery. The artist built the wall three years after his father died and the family inherited the collection whole, and standing in front of it does something a wall text cannot fake.

Forty Years of Machines Filled Every Corner of One House

Johan Creten's father spent more than four decades collecting early computers, obsessed with the technology as it emerged in the 1980s. In words tied to the exhibition, Creten recalls that the collection "occupied not only dedicated storage spaces but every available corner: stacked upon furniture, hidden behind curtains, piled one upon another in an almost archaeological density." That density fills the gallery wall now, beige plastic and boxy monitors, cables still trailing off some of the units, the specific ugliness of consumer electronics from before flat screens existed. A private obsession that filled a house for forty years becomes, once inherited, a public object a stranger can walk up to on a Tuesday afternoon. Creten has said what passed to him was never the machines themselves. It was the impulse to question, the same habit of looking that built the collection in the first place.

Creten was born in 1963 in the Belgian town of Sint Truiden and studied painting at Ghent's Royal Academy before moving to the Beaux Arts in Paris, where he worked in performance before settling on clay in the late 1980s, when ceramics still read as craft rather than art in most serious galleries. He is credited, alongside sculptor Thomas Schütte, with helping pull the medium back into that conversation. His studio, La Solfatara, sits in Montreuil outside Paris. Perrotin has moved its bigger names through several cities this year, including Daniel Arsham's Time Fold survey in London, before Creten's wall of computers landed in the Marais this month.

Perrotin Marais Runs the Show Through October 10

Les Chiens de Pavlov opened September 5 at Perrotin's location on Rue de Turenne in the Marais and runs free through October 10, open Tuesday through Saturday, alongside ceramics, bronzes, and drawings from across Creten's practice. The title borrows Ivan Pavlov's conditioning experiments on purpose, using the computer wall and the surrounding work to probe automatism, the speed at which a familiar image triggers a reaction before a viewer has decided to react at all. A separate section of the show, built around the seven virtues, slows that reflex down deliberately, asking a visitor to sit with power, corruption, and vulnerability instead of scrolling past them. Photographer Claire Dorn shot the installation, and the show carries an ADAGP copyright credit dated 2026, standard for a living artist's gallery presentation in France. No admission fee sits between a visitor and the wall of computers, which is unusual for a show built around a piece this personal.

Studio Partners Do Not Get Equal Real Estate This Month

Creten shares his studio at La Solfatara in Montreuil with Jean-Michel Othoniel, and Perrotin is showing both men in Paris at once this month. Othoniel's blown glass piece Plum Blossom hangs inside Perrotin Matignon's twenty one artist group show, which closes October 3, a week before Creten's Marais solo comes down. A studio partner getting one glass piece into a twenty one artist group hang across town is a smaller placement than a solo wall built from a dead man's computer collection, and the gap between those two bookings is not subtle. Perrotin is betting the bigger swing belongs to Creten this season, not the group show name recognition next door.