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BODEGA - Chapelle des Petits-Augustins, Paris

Bodega (2026)

Entering the Chapelle des Petits Augustins feels like stepping into a faded American dream. The Hot Dog Bureau and the Exchange Bureau await a customer who will never arrive: frozen mannequins, counters covered with kitsch signage, and a few trinkets scattered across the surface. A precise protocol once unfolded there: 99 hot dogs were handed out in exchange for a real interaction, a conversation, a shared moment rather than currency. Through these kiosks, Brieuc Bouwens reactivated an economy of human connection in a world where consumption has rendered everything anonymous. These structures, made from reclaimed materials, have since closed down. What remains are their remnants, transformed into dioramas where exchange itself has become an exhibition object within the museum.

Bureau des Hotdogs (2025)

Further on, large-scale panels accumulate like a collage of pop-up windows within the space, confronting the historical artworks of the site. Standing upright, these billboards display faded images of objects while simultaneously advertising their own exhaustion: a teddy-bear-shaped honey jar, an ice-cream cone piggy bank, and other diverted commodities. Overexposed beneath a Hollywood sun, overly familiar, they seem emptied of their power of attraction: what remains are only image ghosts, whose radiance has disappeared.

Bodega (2026)

Brieuc Bouwens reverses this tendency: against the overwhelming scale of the monumental, he opposes the miniature. Reduced to the scale of models, his kiosks recover a forgotten sense of wonder. The eye lingers on details that previously went unnoticed. Placed on replicas of cardboard boxes ( Brancusi-like pedestals screen-printed with the names of Rothko, de Kooning, or Beuys ) they evoke an attic where the relics of a past fantasy have accumulated.
- Anne-Laure Peressin, June 2026

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