‘Système domestique’, Guillaume Valenti’s new exhibition, presents a series of paintings produced within the enclosed space of the artist’s home. Alternating between views from the studio window and depictions of his bookshelf at different moments of the day, the works extend a methodology central to his practice: an intimate point of departure that is reframed within a broader inquiry into the status of the image and its conditions of circulation in contemporary visual culture.

At the core of this domestic system lies the orthogonal grid, commonly referred to in painting as “mise au carreau”, which has long engaged the artist as a device for translating the image and its proportions from the real to the graphic. Here, the grid assumes a material presence, its lines embodied by those of the bookshelf itself. In a gesture recalling seventeenth-century Flemish cabinets of curiosities, or André Breton’s wall now preserved at the Centre Pompidou, the library emerges as a form of self-portrait. Works gifted by fellow artists, books on the painters who have shaped his vision of art, together with everyday objects imbued with personal memory, coalesce into the salient features of his identity- his own pantheon.

These works, however, extend beyond the register of the personal to engage a broader reflection on systems of representation. The bookshelf functions not only as a site of storage, but as a dispositif of display- presented to those who cross the threshold of the domestic interior. It becomes a stage upon which subjectivity is composed, negotiated, and projected, and where personal mythologies take form through processes of selection, arrangement, and visibility.

The logic of mise au carreau thus expands into a wider conceptual framework. The structuring of intimate material into discrete units mirrors a contemporary condition in which private experience is increasingly formatted for public exposure. Personal references coalesce into composite images of the self, producing a gradual shift from interiority to display- a form of pixelation in which complex subjectivity is rendered into legible fragments, revealed case by case, shelf by shelf.

Two paintings of the exterior of the artist’s studio punctuate this system, introducing moments of visual and conceptual interval, like brief apertures between the variables of an identity in the process of being articulated.