Plein Soleil at Galleria Continua looks beneath the brightness of summer

Galleria Continua presents Plein Soleil, a group exhibition across its two Paris spaces in the Marais and Matignon, bringing together works by artists including Adel Abdessemed, Ai Weiwei, Nikhil Chopra, Hans Op de Beeck, Nari Ward, José Yaque and Marta Spagnoli. On view from June 10 – August 29, 2026, the art exhibition at the gallery's Paris Matignon location brings together contemporary artists from different generations and geographies to evoke the sensations associated with summer—its light, colour, landscapes and sense of leisure—while looking beneath this carefree imagery at questions surrounding movement, privilege and environmental and social inequalities.

Colour takes a central role across both spaces, creating what Galleria Continua describes as a “luminous, vibrant atmosphere.” Plein Soleil recalls flowering trees, colourful beach parasols, tourist crowds, starlit nights, travel and leisure, but these familiar images gradually give way to more complex questions. The possibility of travel and movement, the art gallery notes, is itself a privilege, while mass tourism carries environmental consequences and movement can also be driven by political, economic or climatic circumstances. “This way, the imagery of mobility, discovery and escape [takes] on a more ambivalent dimension, revealing the inequalities that underpin our relationship to movement,” the gallery mentions in the official release.

The exhibition takes its title from Plein Soleil, the 1960 cinematic masterpiece whose Mediterranean landscapes and intense light contrast with the moral darkness of its plot. The film’s crimes unfold in broad daylight, beneath a light that appears to reveal everything. In a similar vein, the exhibition uses its bright, summery aesthetic to bring contemporary contradictions into view. As the release explains, “... Plein Soleil allows essential questions of our contemporary societies to surface behind a joyful, summery aesthetic. It thus invites the viewer to move beyond the immediate seduction of the works and interrogate the more complex issues they convey.”

Among the works on view is Adel Abdessemed’s Politics of Drawing, Oiseau, a charcoal drawing of a small bird perched on a branch. The unstable and powdery medium lends fragility to the image, which forms part of the artist’s preparatory work for Olivier Messiaen’s opera Saint François d’Assise, specifically the scene of the Sermon to the Birds. What initially appears to be a still, naturalist study instead presents the bird as a precarious figure, balanced at the edge of a void. The work becomes, as the press release describes it, a “silent metaphor for the living being confronted with the violence of the world, at once present and threatened, free and vulnerable.”

Colored Vases by Ai Weiwei greets visitors with a sculptural installation comprising three ancient Chinese jars, dating from the Neolithic period and the Han dynasty, coated in industrial paint. Their surfaces—and therefore their histories—are concealed beneath the dried layer of colour. The original forms remain present despite being obscured, becoming an image of a history the artist describes as “invisible but always present.” Through this act of masking, Ai Weiwei’s iconoclasm questions the values that shape our relationship with the past, as Galleria Continua shares in the press release.

A darker reading of the exhibition emerges in Hans Op de Beeck’s Fable, where songbirds appear frozen within an atmosphere of silence, contemplation and darkness. Known for an aesthetic that is grey, muffled and seemingly timeless, the artist presents two birds stripped of their vitality and condemned to stillness. Despite the gentleness suggested by its title, the sculpture consequently introduces a more unsettling image into the showcase, the press release states.

The transformation of symbols and everyday materials is further explored through Crying Form, Rising Symbol by Nari Ward. Here, the artist takes the star—one of iconography’s most potent motifs—and strips it of its aura of glory by reconstructing it with everyday elements such as shoelaces. The contemporary artwork’s title captures the tension at its centre, where an appearance marked by decadence exists alongside the star’s enduring symbolic power.

Marta Spagnoli’s diptych from the Armor series continues the show’s exploration of transformation, natural forces and human intervention. Establishing a visual dialogue between the wild and the primordial, the works consider the continual reconfiguration of landscapes by human activity. Organic forms such as seaweed are layered with paint and painterly gestures, evoking different forms of environmental disruption. Suspended within a collective, swirling movement, these elements suggest a passage from chaos to order and, ultimately, the human impulse to dominate nature, according to the press release.

Through these works, Plein Soleil brings together the apparent lightness of summer with the contradictions and challenges embedded beneath it. “The exhibition unfolds the full complexity of contemporary society, its contradictions and persistent challenges, with the intention not of concealing or softening them, but of exposing them, in broad daylight,” as the gallery puts it.