Paname at the Petit Palais: Paris, Painted Into the Canon

Bilal Hamdad was born in 1987 in Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria, then trained in France, graduating from the Beaux Arts de Paris in 2018. His paintings arrive at first glance with photographic clarity, then open up, up close, into textured brushwork and a kind of emotional grain. The method starts in motion: Hamdad shoots what he sees across cafés, sidewalks, and Métro corridors, treating his phone as a working tool, then rebuilding several moments into one composed memory in the studio. “I use my camera as a sketchbook,” he explains.

The title, Paname, borrows Paris slang and pulls the city off the postcard and into lived reality. The show focuses on what Hamdad calls urban solitude: bodies packed together, minds elsewhere, faces lit by screens, pauses suspended between stops. He paints commuters, vendors, and passersby with a quiet dignity that feels both documentary and monumental, a reminder that modern Paris runs on people who rarely get painted at this scale.

That is where the Petit Palais setting becomes the point. Curated by Annick Lemoine with Sixtine de Saint Léger, the exhibition places around twenty works, including two made for the occasion, in active dialogue with the museum’s nineteenth century masters and historic rooms. The “mirror effect” lands immediately: Hamdad’s Angélus (2021) stages a meditative figure in transit, while Rive droite (2021) captures the charged choreography of Barbès Rochechouart, a contemporary social tableau that holds its own beside inherited ideas of grandeur.

In the end, the Paname at the Petit Palais earns its reputation as one of the museum exhibitions worth travelling for because it raises a bigger question than style: who gets to be seen, who gets to be remembered, and what Paris chooses to monumentalize right now.