From Stripes to Sunsets, Ben Arpéa Paints Vibrant Memories in New Paris Exhibition

For his first solo exhibition at 193 Gallery in Paris, French multidisciplinary artist Ben Arpéa invites viewers into a suspended world where memory becomes form, color, and texture. “De Mémoire” (on view September 4 through October 28, 2025, at 24 rue Béranger) traces a line between the intimate and the universal, articulating the shifting territory of remembrance through painting, sculpture, and immersive environments.

A Luminous Language Between Abstraction and Figuration

Arpéa, who has steadily built an international presence with exhibitions in New York, Venice, Los Angeles, Geneva, and beyond, as well as collaborations with luxury houses such as Hermès and Acqua di Parma, here refines a language that sits at the intersection of abstraction and figuration. His canvases, punctuated by recurring suns and structured by the geometry of vertical and horizontal lines, radiate a Mediterranean light that feels both hypnotic and soothing. Neither pure landscape nor still life, these works exist in a liminal zone between dream and reality, as if fragments of recollection had crystallized into painted form.

Memory as Material, Extending Into the Digital Realm

What distinguishes Arpéa’s practice is his treatment of memory as a material in its own right. Surfaces built up with acrylic, oil, and sand invite not just vision but touch, evoking the tactile sensation of time lived and lost. 

“What distinguishes Arpéa’s practice is his treatment of memory as a material in its own right,”

In these paintings, the absence of human figures paradoxically heightens the human condition: the solitude of contemplation, the echo of a past moment, the fleeting sense of déjà-vu. The spectator is asked to step in, to confront their own recollections in dialogue with Arpéa’s, making De Mémoire less an exhibition than a shared experience of remembrance.

This interplay between personal and collective has always been present in Arpéa’s oeuvre, but De Mémoire marks a significant deepening of his exploration. It is also a show that extends his work into the digital realm. 

In collaboration with Danae.io, Arpéa has created his first NFT, bridging the analog tactility of sand and oil with the immateriality of the blockchain. The work underscores his vision of memory as mutable and ever-reinterpreted a trace that can exist both as physical matter and digital imprint, as enduring as it is ephemeral.

A Quiet Poetics in the Age of Screens

Beyond the gallery walls, Arpéa’s influence has already reached the broader cultural sphere. His works reside in significant private and institutional collections, cementing his relevance across both art and luxury. Yet in De Mémoire, there is no sense of spectacle or overstatement. Instead, there is a quiet poetics, a reverence for the fragile ways in which memory shapes perception and, in turn, identity.

“Beyond the gallery walls, Arpéa’s influence has already reached the broader cultural sphere,”

Walking through the exhibition, one is struck by a sense of temporal layering of pasts and presents interwoven, light refracted through recollection. In an age where memory is increasingly mediated by screens and digital archives, Arpéa reclaims its slowness, its sensuality, its mystery. He reminds us that remembering is not about accuracy but about feeling, and that art, at its most powerful, gives form to what remains just out of reach.

Ben Arpéa: A Voice of His Generation

With De Mémoire, Ben Arpéa positions himself not only as one of the most promising voices of his generation, but as an artist capable of crafting experiences that transcend medium and mode. The exhibition is a meditation on time’s persistence and fragility, a poetic bridge between the physical and the digital, and a luminous testament to the enduring power of memory.

“He reminds us that remembering is not about accuracy but about feeling,”