LONDON.- PM/AM Gallery will present Would you wear my eyes?, a solo booth of new work by Nicolas Lebeau, at ART-O-RAMA, the international contemporary art fair, taking place at La Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille from 28–30 August 2026. The presentation, located in the Galleries & Editions section at La Cartonnerie, reconfigures a body of work first shown at Galerie Mennour in Paris in March 2026 into a more intimate, spatially concentrated booth format. The formal and material vocabulary established in that first presentation remains largely unchanged; what shifts is the imagery itself, reused and recontextualised to generate new associations in the new setting, the booth reads as a continuation of the earlier show rather than a repeat of it.
Lebeau’s practice responds to the growing entanglement of the image with systems of surveillance and control. The exhibition’s title nods to the poet Bob Kaufman, pointing to the way images can be inherited from one viewer to another and continue circulating long after they’re first seen. Made over six months between France and Brazil, the work draws on Lebeau’s own photography alongside lower-resolution images circulating on Telegram channels documenting ongoing global conflict. Recurring motifs - a tired eye, a hand testing a surface, a face turned from view - run through the installation as a loose visual thread.
The works are produced through three distinct techniques: photographs run through deliberately modified printers to introduce distortion and defect; a second group disrupted at the code level through data-editing and set into wooden frames; and a small set of untouched devotional portraits of women in prayer, which sit apart from the rest as points of stillness.
Lebeau extends the photographs into sculpture, suspended from steel rails or floated in plexiglass boxes so their physical weight and positioning resist easy visibility, alongside melted glass bottles and forms adapted from anti-climb security structures. A red camouflage treatment along the booth’s wall edges echoes the pixelation running through the photographic work.
“Lebeau’s work speaks to something genuinely of the moment, how the systems built to watch us shape what we’re allowed to be seen doing, and what happens when images themselves start to resist those systems. It felt like the right work to bring to a fair like this, where that tension between visibility and control is very much in the air.” - Patrick Barstow, PM/AM
Nicolas Lebeau (b. 1992, Paris) is a French-Brazilian artist based between Paris and Rio de Janeiro. He came to photography as a teenager through skateboarding, teaching himself the medium via online forums before studying at the cole Nationale Suprieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy, from which he graduated with honours in 2024, followed by a postgraduate year at CAL. His work has been written about in Numro, Fisheye, Vogue, Fvtvrist and Opium Philosophy, and shown at Galerie Mennour (Emergence Programme, 2025; his first solo exhibition with the gallery in 2026), Fondation Francs, La Grande Halle de La Villette, and Ygrec, as well as at ARCO Madrid with the Institut Franais d’Espagne. He is the recipient of the 2026 Encore ! Grant by Groupe Chess, the 2025 Mennour Emergence Prize and was a finalist for the 2026 Bourse du Talent Picto and the 2025 Paris Photo Carte Blanche; his work is held in the collections of Fondation Francs and Christian Louboutin. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at Interface x Le U in Beaune and group shows at Le 6B in Saint-Denis and the Quadrilatre in Beauvais.
