Rather than serving as a static tribute, the exhibition "Arman. All That Remains," running until October 27 at the Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois Gallery in Paris, demonstrates the enduring relevance of an artist's work that, beginning in 1959, questioned the grip objects have on our lives, their proliferation, and their planned obsolescence. Arman (1928-2005) managed to capture the stakes of a society that deifies consumption, where the boundaries between sacred, profane, and consumerism become blurred, confronting the frenzy of shopping elevated to the rank of pure spiritual satisfaction.
The exhibition layout does not follow a chronological path but instead confronts the gestures that structure Arman's work: accumulation and destruction. Accumulated Renault 106 hoods, a column of shopping carts stacked in the gap left by the vertical cutting of a refrigerator, and a meticulously ordered collection of coat hangers all become metaphors for the collective, for union and disunion. The artist brings forth the enigmatic beauty of objects that have become repeated forms and silhouettes.
The title chosen by Bernard Blistène, "All That Remains," evokes the survivor and the fragment. By accumulating our objects and exposing our waste, Arman constructs a collection of a segment of industrial civilization: what he preserves from it. This collection looks back at us, holding up a mirror for us to reflect, with greater discernment, on our relationship with things, compulsion, abandonment, and retention.
Arman began with elementary gestures: stamping, making imprints, accumulating, burning, destroying, cutting, collecting. He continued these practices until his death, working in series like open construction sites. His "Cuts" reveal the interior of forms, his "Combustions" reveal the transformative power of fire, and his "Trash Cans" and "Reliquaries" elevate refuse toward the sublime. His work materializes a radical proposition: to perceive the reality of industrial and consumerist systems, making them his material and poetic space. He does not copy a form or imitate it.
With singular lyricism, he freezes the function of an object in splendid accumulations, secularizing its obsolescence. Here are coffee grinders suspended above enamel coffee pots, a collection of crucifixes and devotional images, leather strap boxes, and fans. Arman is not simply a member of the New Realism movement or the artist of these spectacular accumulations. He is, above all, a sculptor in the most demanding sense of the term, a creator who, like the greatest before him, tackled the fundamental questions of sculpture: mass, volume, scale, curves, silhouette, and harmony.
"I didn't find the principle of accumulation; it found me," Arman once said. Society nourishes its sense of security through preservation, which is itself cumulative. Arman articulated this vertigo of the archive with lucidity: "I hope to translate the anxieties arising from the diminution of spaces and surfaces, and from the invasion of our industrial secretions."
Two singular works follow this logic in opposite ways. In the register of the rejected, the exhibition presents "Garbage New York" (1969), a pure ready-made: a galvanized aluminum trash can, collected as it was found. In the register of giving, "The Exchange Pile" (1965) allows you to choose an object deposited in the gallery if you replace it with an object you bring. Visitors are invited to participate in this interactive exchange.
The exhibition "Arman. All That Remains" continues at the Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois Gallery, located at 36 Rue de Seine, 75006 Paris, until October 27, 2025. The show explores themes ranging from recovery to recycling, connecting art and ecology in ways that remain strikingly relevant to contemporary discussions about consumption and waste.
