A Solo Show by Pascal Duval 
26.06 - 30.08 2026

Once Upon a Time Called Now brings together a new body of paintings by Pascal Duval built around the fascination with the group. Fans, the cult, dinner tables, street gangs, boardrooms, fight clubs, band lineups. People who found each other, or were thrown together, and in that proximity became something bigger.

"I've spent my life moving between worlds, drawn to certain groups. Close enough to feel the pull, self-aware enough to know I would never be fully part of it. These paintings live within the energy of the group itself. The attraction, the tension, the strange compulsion that draws us together. The idea of looking at these paintings from the outside, as a group of spectators and at the same time being looked at by a group is quite intriguing."

The title holds that tension: 'Once Upon a Time' is nostalgia, mythology, distance. 'Called Now' is the insistence that none of it is history. These groups, these moments of belonging, are not relics. They are the present tense. They are part of humanity.

Duval moves freely across decades and subcultures, pulling figures from the margins and the mainstream alike. Sukeban girl gangs and 1950s Wall Street, delirious fans in the front rows and 1970s Japanese pop formality, the artist dinner and the Centre Parcs family holiday. What connects them is not genre or era but presence: the energy of people being together, and the need to devote ourselves, to belong to something, good or bad.