Galerie Les filles du calvaire 

Founded in 1996 by Stéphane Magnan in the Marais district of Paris, Les filles du calvaire historically established itself at 17 rue des Filles du Calvaire. In 2023, it reinforced its mission of promoting and supporting artists by inaugurating a second space at 21 rue Chapon.

Since its beginnings, Les filles du calvaire gallery has been committed to promoting contemporary creation through a diversified exploration of artistic mediums. From conceptual works to photography, encompassing painting, sculpture, video and performance, the variety of artistic expressions reflects the gallery’s ongoing commitment to exploring new languages of creation.

True to its support for visual artists, Les filles du calvaire has been accompanying artists from various backgrounds for over twenty years. The gallery, in particular, has established close ties with the national and international photographic scene, supporting historical artists and pioneers of contemporary art. 

With the opening of its second space in 2023, Les Filles du Calvaire continues its commitment to promoting contemporary creation. The gallery participates in fairs both in France and abroad, collaborating with numerous institutions and external curators. By providing a platform for both emerging and established artists, the gallery solidifies its position as an essential reference in the Parisian and international art scene.

Represented Artists

• Laia Abril
• Bianca Argimón
• Art Orienté Objet
• The Bells Angels
• Katrien De Blauwer
• Paz Corona
• Jérémie Cosimi
• Léo Fourdrinier
• Makiko Furuichi
• Frances Goodman
• Julia Haumont
• Todd Hido
• Karen Knorr
• Katinka Lampe
• Diana Markosian
• Kate MccGwire
• Olivier Mosset
• Ethan Murrow
• Nelli Palomäki
• Clara Rivault
• Karine Rougier
• Kourtney Roy
• Emmanuel Saulnier
• Lore Stessel
• Maya Inès Touam
• Levi van Veluw

Collaborations

• Abdelhak Benallou
• Arielle Bobb-Willis
• Jean-Christian Bourcart
• Scarlett Coten
• Charles Fréger
• James Hyde
• Tania Franco Klein
• Ellen Kooi
• Juul Kraijer
• Katalin Ladik
• Thomas Lévy-Lasne
• Paulien Oltheten
• Marie Quéau
• Yusuf Sevinçli

Works By

• Helena Almeida
• Thibaut Cuisset
• Antoine d’Agata
• Gilbert Fastenaekens

17 rue des Filles-du-Calvaire,
75003 Paris

Phone number: +33 (0)1 42 74 47 05

[email protected]

Open on Tuesday from 2:00 PM to 6:30 PM

Open Wednesday to Saturday from 11:00 AM to 6:30 PM

Closed on public holidays

Team

Founder
Stéphane Magnan

Director & artistic director
Marie Magnier

Artistic director 
Charlotte Boudon

Gallery manager & artist liaison
Lou Baudillon Coutet

Communication manager & artist liaison
Lila Casidanus

Gallery assistant
Symphorose Guillon

Administation & production assistant

Marco Valentini

Registrar
Dorothée Dupla

FIU Frost — Agustín Fernández: The Alluring Power of Ambiguity

Written By Olga Garcia-Mayoral

On view: February 15, 2025-January 25, 2026 | Site visit: October 26, 2025

Standing in the first gallery at the Frost, you feel Agustín Fernández pull two magnets in opposite directions–flesh and mechanism, ache and elegance, seduction and restraint. The surfaces are satiny, almost inhaled; the forms are knotted, pinned, cinched, sliced. It’s a language at once intimate and armored, a non-dualist grammar that refuses to choose between figuration and abstraction. Curated by Elizabeth T. Goizueta with assistance from Gabriela Goizueta, The Alluring Power of Ambiguity is less a linear retrospective than a lucid anthology of Fernández’s obsession: bodies that masquerade as objects, objects that vibrate with sentience, and desire treated not as illustration but as structure.

Born in Havana in 1928 and trained at San Alejandro (with formative detours to the Arts Students League in New York and Madrid’s Real Academia), Fernández left Cuba for Paris in 1959 and would never return to live on the island. The exhibition tracks that peripatetic trajectory–Paris, San Juan, New York–without reducing the work to biography. Instead, it tunes us how exile recalibrates seeing. The monochromes (and near-monochromes) that define much of his mature work push against the color-saturated “Cuban canon,” as the museum’s notes put it, and that resistance reads as productive friction: a refusal to be summarized by palette. Fernández subtracts color to sharpen anatomy–not literal anatomy, but the touch, pressure and restraint.

Seduction as Structure

Across more than 65 works–paintings, drawings, collages, portfolios–the exhibition makes a crisp case for Fernández as both “painter of the brush” and draftsman of uncommon bite. A room of drawings reveal his precision with the line: folded paper that seems to crease as you watch; pins, hooks, belts and spikes that operate like punctuation marks, toggling tensions between the seen and the implied. The “tool” motifs are not props; they are syntax. They bind, puncture, fasten; they also tease. In painting, his gloved grays and metallic creams glow like skin under studio lights, while hard edges and ligatures interrupt the caress.

The erotics is never simply illustrative. Fernández stages the conditions for desires–veils and un-veils, tugs and releases–inside the picture plane. In one large canvas, ribbons and belts gather into a torqued knot that reads as both ligament and lacing. You sense muscles preparing to flex even though there are no bodies depicted–only intimation of them, abstracted into pulls and counter-pulls. Elsewhere, a field of soft gradation is cut by a glossy seam with acuity of a scalpel. You can almost feel the coolness of the surface where the brush has polished a highlight to metal.

Materials, Methods, and the Pleasure of Control

If Fernández’s visual language seduces, his technique closes the deal. The paintings’ “finish”– that sleek, buffed, nearly industrial skin–carries a paradoxical warmth. Up close, you find the trace of the hand: tight modulations, slight burrs where once glaze meets another, the faint tremor of a hairline. The show smartly pairs paintings and drawings so viewers can triangulate how a hook in graphite becomes a hinge in oil, or how a receding gradient in pencil rehearses a large swoon on linen. 

Equally strong is the curatorial emphasis on ephemera: letters, photographs, and studio notes that widen the aperture on Fernández’s process and psyche. They are not mere supplements. They materialize the world in which the paintings were possible–the friends, the debts, the nights and jobs that funded the days in the studio. A vitrine of clippings from Paris in the 60’s sits near later New York snapshots; together they chart a life lived inside international avant-gardes without surrendering to any one school.

Dialogues and Lineages

The wall texts sketch Fernández’s influences–surrealism’s charged objects, post-Minimalism’s cool rigor, even traces of downtown New York’s punk attitude–yet what’s striking is how fully he metabolized them. The surrealist legacy appears not as dream iconography but as the psychic weight of things; the post-Minimal turns up not as a unit/repeat modules but as an ethic of surface and discipline. And the “punk” is less about noise than stance: a refusal to behave, to please, to be decoded quickly.

That stance is especially resonant in Miami, a city where Cuban modernisms are often (mis)read through tropes of tropical color and nostalgia. The Frost’s thesis–that Fernández monochrome and surgical, sits apart from that expectation–feels right. But the exhibition also positions him inside a broader conversation about the body in late modernism: how artists in the 1960s-80s contended with desire and control, violence and care, in the wake of both historical trauma and new sexual politics. In Fernández, the wounded and the polished share a skin. 

Fashion as Afterimage

One of the most engaging surprises is a custom dress by designer Fernando Pena, commissioned after one of  Fernández’s iconic paintings. The garment sits like a mirage between sculpture and apparel: seams echo canvas ligatures; a bodice folds with the logic of his drawn paper; the palette stays loyal to his disciplined grays. Rather than costume the art, the dress translates it –re-engineering pictorial tensions as patternmaking problems. It’s a deft curatorial gesture, especially in Miami, where fashion is often spectacle; here, it becomes exegesis. You see how Fernández’s forms want to move on bodies, not just in the mind. 

The Mind on the Page: Memoir and Voice

Alongside the artworks, the exhibition includes an unpublished memoir, Adiós al barroco. Detailing about his human experience in Cuba from childhood to early adulthood. Fernández delves into this artistic practice, literacy influences and the friendships he fostered throughout his career. Also dedicating a chapter to New York City’s photographer Robert Mapplethrope, whose demise from AIDS was a devastating loss for both himself and his wife Lisa. Later Fernández’s re-examins his life from the context of ancient civilizations of Mexico. 

That caveat aside, the memoir’s presence matters. It frames Fernández’s not only as an image-maker but as a thinker of images–someone for whom ambiguity is not a pose but an ethic.

Ambiguity, Read for a New Generation

The exhibition title earns its keep. In 2025, ambiguity is not always alluring in public life; we are trained to demand declarations. Fernández insists on the opposite: that ambiguity can be a site of intimacy and rigor. The show is careful not to reduce his knots and clamps to allegories of exile (though they can be read that way). Instead, it gives multiple entry points–material, erotic, historial–so new audiences in Miami can triangulate their own readings. Teens admiring the ephemera of the legacy, a couple debated whether a painting’s central pinch was a space, unhurried sightlines–lets those debates breathe. 

Framing, Not Freezing, a Legacy

The Frost is an important site for Fernández’s. Its 1992 retrospective helped anchor his presence in Miami institutional memory; this exhibition deepens that commitment while updating the conversation. Works from estate, private collections, and the museum’s holdings–many never exhibited–are the show’s ballast. Together they extend a thesis: Fernández belongs to a transnational modernism that is at once Cuban and unbound, Latin American and global, erotic and ascetic.  

What lingers after the walkthrough is the sense that ambiguity here is not fog but focus. Fernández asks us to attend–to surfaces, seams, restraints, releases. He insists that desire is a form of knowledge and that control, when tenderly applied, can be a kind of care. For audiences encountering him for the first time, that proposition lands with clarity. For those returning, it feels like permission to keep looking. 

Closing Thought

Fernández once described himself first and last as a painter–a vocation of patience and exactitude. That feels right in these rooms, where ambiguity is engineered with the care of a tailor and the courage of a surgeon. The allure is real, but so is the power: a steady voltage running through the belts and seams, through grays that smolder. The guest curatorial team did an outstanding collaboration showcasing the legacy of this Cuban painter. In a city that loves the declarative, this exhibition is an argument for the whisper—and the long look. For Miami’s expanding audiences–students, designers, artists, collectors–this exhibit offers a rigorous alternative genealogy of Cuban and Latin American modernism, one that privileges discipline, ambiguity and the erotics of form over easy brightness. 

A Night of Wonder: Stéphane Denève, The Best of John Williams

Written By Olga Garcia-Mayoral

Stéphane Denève already radiates the kind of buoyant curiosity that makes an audience lean forward. The French conductor, known internationally for his affinity for living composers, is an eloquent champion of John Williams’ music, on the podium and in conversation — led the New World Symphony’s “The Best of John Williams” at Knight Concert Hall on October 18, 2025. In person, Denève is generous and effusive, the sort of maestro who quotes Spielberg with a twinkle and then, in the following breath, talks about brass endurance and woodwind transparency with surgical precision.

Maestro Denève, the Artistic Director of the New World Symphony, walks on stage with the ease of someone who genuinely loves the company he’s keeping–both the orchestra in front of him and the composer he’s celebrating. In conversation, “We will play tonight a piece called Harry’s Wondrous World,” he told me before the concert, “and I think there is always this feeling of wonder associated with him, with his music…just love.” That word–wonder–would become a signature thread through the evening at Knight Concert Hall. This program doubled as a tribute, a masterclass, and for me, a profoundly personal homecoming to the soundtracks of my childhood.

I met Denève an hour before the grand performance. I had a list of questions; We sat for a brisk exchange that flowed like the sound chamber of secrets. When I asked how he curated the night for Williams’ immense catalog, he smiled with a conductor’s familiar blend of delight and pragmatism. “It is tough to choose indeed, because I love so many of his pieces,” he said. “The idea I had was to perform a concerto of his… I wanted the audience, who often comes for the film music–to discover another part of what he composed. And then I tried to choose what would be good for the fellows to work on…to show them how rich this music is, how varied, and how much it rewards care and detail.”

If curation was the scaffolding, emotion was the architecture. Of all the selections, Denève admitted he feels the closest to E.T. “I was 10 years old when E.T.  was released. I was the exact same age as Elliot…I believe it’s the first time I cried in a movie theater.” He recalled Spielberg’s famous line–“I can bring the audience to the brink of crying, but it is John Williams’ music that makes the tear fall”–and then nodded, as if to say: yes, and tonight we’ll prove it. 

From my seat in the third row of the orchestra, the program unfurled like a reel of living memory. The violins spun the opening sheen of Harry’s Wondrous Word, and I was instantly eight again, reading in my living room while the soundtrack blasted through my CD player. The oboe’s phrasing, tender but unsentimental, led into a string swell that triggered that fizzy, head-to-toe sensation I only get with Williams: an ache that also lifts the soul. I felt tears pool–not just at the melody, but at its craftsmanship: how the inner notes braid, how percussion is held back a half-beat longer than you expect, how brass are invited to declaim but never bludgeon. Denève drew out those details with a kind of clarity that feels generous rather than clinical. 

I asked him how he balances fidelity to the original film recordings with the creative license of a concert performance. His response was liberating as it was practical. “Since we have the recordings and the movie, should we do exactly the same? I don’t think so,” he said. “His music is so rich it can be played without the movie. In film, he followed the timing–but in concert, I feel very at ease to put my own interpretation and feelings into the piece. Every conductor, every orchestra can do it differently. That’s beautiful.” You heard that freedom in Raiders March, where Denève shaped the main theme with a swagger just loose enough to dance, in Yoda’s theme, where he let the lines breathe-slightly elongated cadences that made the wisdom in the melody feel earned rather than announced. 

So much of Williams’ writing is attached to images–bikes across the mood, dinosaurs in nature, and spaceships flying in Space–that it’s fair to ask whether the music holds the same weight without them. Denève argues that his reasoning is, yes, rooted in craft. At Williams’ home, he once studied the cue sheets that map the film to the score nearly “second after second.” “He’s really following the movie precisely,” Denève said. “But at the same time, he creates a musical logic in parallel–so strong that if you remove the movie, the logic is convincing. You follow the story of the music without knowing anything about the film.” That parallel logic is exactly what filled the hall in the theme from Jurassic Park. Without dinosaurs on screen, the brass chorale glowed as an ode to awe itself: not spectacle but scale; not fear but reverence.

There’s a persistent critique that Williams’ language leans heavily on Romantic and late-19th-century idioms. Denève brushed aside the charge with a historian’s perspective and a practitioner’s ear. “Every great composer is like a sponge…No good music comes from nowhere,” he said. Influences are inevitable and honorable. “You always recognize John Williams’ music for what it is–John Williams. There’s nothing to ‘defend’. He never quotes; the genius is in the voice. The melodies are his.” He even credits Williams with something larger than any single score: “I think he saved the symphony orchestra in popular culture,” Denève said, noting how Star Wars re-associated orchestral sound with futuristic storytelling and how blockbusters still turn to orchestras when they need true power. 

Backstage realities shape poetry, too. Denève described the demands these pieces place on an ensemble–” virtuosity…endurance…transparency, working on layers.” He singled out the brass for their stamina and control, and spoke about sculpting what he called “the John Williams sound,” a warm, richly blended sonority rooted in the kind of German repertoire.” One practical decision revealed the conductors-as-producer: in Close Encounters, an organ is optional. “I decided not to make it optional,” he said with a grin. “Otherwise, it’s lacking. So we organized an electronic organ to be brought here.” That touch mattered later — when the harmonics opened under the strings, the organ’s quiet foundation made the air in the hall feel charged.

Personally, the night pressed a finger on memories I didn’t realize were still humming. My father is a lifelong Star Wars and Indiana Jones devotee; growing up, our family listened to the vinyl soundtracks and had movie marathons. When Harry’s Wondrous World, the audience was once again a group of curious children, marveling at the world before them. Hearing the Raiders March in the room where it happens–a brass line that grins as it strides–was like opening a time capsule and finding it still warm. Yoda’s theme arrived, and I thought about patience and mentorship; when the clarinet offered its gentle answer to the strings, I thought about my own mentors in the arts who trusted me before I knew how to master myself. 

Denève’s relationship with Williams goes beyond advocacy. “It’s the truth that we are friends,” he shared. They’ve worked through scores side by side at Williams’ home, traveled together to Japan, and shared stages for significant milestones. Denève was invited to conduct at the composer’s 90th birthday celebration in Washington, and later a gala with him at Carnegie Hall. He paints a portrait of an artist whose celebrity never curdles into self-regard. “He looks at you with curiosity…He never really wants to speak about himself,” Denève said. “He’s the most generous human being, the most humble. When you are with him, you feel at ease; you can be yourself.” That humility, Denève suggests, is inseparable from the music’s openness–the way it welcomes listeners into big feelings without condescension.

Miami calls itself the Magic City, so I asked Denève about dreaming–how to keep it alive at every stage of an artist’s life. His answer was as much a philosophy as a practice. “The key is curiosity and a sense of marveling,” he said. “There are so many things to admire.” He spoke of his own path with genuine gratitude: moving to Paris at 18, discovering operas and concerts, meeting extraordinary artists. “I feel my life is a permanent bonus…like a child in a toy shop.” That attitude, he added, is one reason Williams’ music keeps its charge; it keeps us “on the right side of the Force.”

In the Hall, that childlike joy radiated through the Flying theme of E.T. Denève, widened the phrase just enough before the takeoff–the bar where the melody vaults and the harmony blossoms–and I felt my throat rise with it. When the bikes finally lifted (if only in our collective imagination), the audience breathed as one. 

If you spend enough time with John Williams’ music, you come to feel what Denève articulated so simply: that the work invites you to love without embarrassment–to feel big feelings in full color and excellent counterpoint. At the end of our interview, I asked him to describe Williams’ legacy in one word. He didn’t hesitate. “Wonder,” he said. Then, after a beat: “Love.”

Those words described my night as well. Sitting in the third row, I was a writer, a listener, a professional with a passion, a kid with goosebumps, a curator thinking about programming, and a daughter remembering beautiful family memories and stories that took flight. Denève and the New World Symphony fellows didn’t just play the best of John Williams; they reminded me why this music endures off-screen–why, in a concert hall, it can stand on its own and still carry every memory with it. On the way out, Denève whispered, “May the Force be with you.” For once, the cliché felt earned. In Miami’s Magic City, on a night devoted to a composer of galaxies and gardens, we were all, for a couple of hours, on the side of wonder.