With The Harlequin’s Dog, Amy Sillman opens a dialogue between her work and that of Clément Rodzielski and Étienne-Martin, taking the figure of Harlequin as a starting point—understood not as a narrative character, but as an unstable structure grounded in fragmentation, the shifting of roles, and the multiplication of identities. 

Across the three artists, each practice unfolds not through linear development but through displacement, assemblage, and reconfiguration. This logic produces forms in which figural identity remains unpredictable, continually interlacing between figuration, abstraction, and theatricality.

The title emerges from a set of cross-references: Étienne-Martin’s sculpture Arlequin ou Novalis, made towards the end of his life, and the marginal, almost indiscernible presence of a dog hidden behind a figure dressed as Harlequin in Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921). These elements function as indices of a construction of the image in which the relations between centre and periphery, figure and background, color and form, and even animal and human, are no longer hierarchically organized. For Étienne-Martin, this involves questioning sculpture as a stable, finished, and autonomous object; for Picasso, a rethinking of hierarchies within the composition itself—both participating in a broader shift in the conditions under which images become legible.

In a similar way, Amy Sillman’s paintings are built through layering, erasure, and revision, often leaving visible traces of doubt and transformation on the surface. The artist has described painting as a form of “thinking in public,” where mistakes and revisions are constitutive of the process rather than concealed. Sillman articulates figuration and abstraction in unstable compositions that resist fixed meaning, traversed by humour and a psychological tension that challenge the somber manner traditionally associated with modernist abstraction. For this exhibition, Sillman has proposed small stages as the grounds for the “figures” that the various works embody.

Since the beginning of his practice, Clément Rodzielski has interrogated the presence of images, their mechanisms of appearance, and their conditions of existence. Beyond appropriation or détournement, he develops protocols that he applies to his paintings. He works through cutting and assembling heterogeneous materials, such as fragments of Zentai suits—Japanese garments drawn from performative and fetish practices that envelop the body like a second skin and allow it to merge with colour.

The exhibition thus focuses on zones of destabilization within representation: color as a primary logic, silhouettes, iterative repetitions,  peripheral elements, and oblique gestures, not to mention the actual “staging” of artworks, which shift the reading of images towards processes of montage and disjunction. It engages with the contemporary status of representation, especially when marked by a sense of animation and humor that can be produced when forms are continuously recirculated and reconfigured.