Victoria Palacios’ “Je veux qu’elles restent” at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris: Painting as a Crowded Stage

The curtain is half open, the costumes are slipping, and nobody is quite sure which side of the footlights they are on. That is the world of Victoria Palacios’ “Je veux qu’elles restent” at Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris, a solo exhibition of nearly fifty new works on view from 18 November to 24 December 2026 at the gallery’s Cloître Saint-Merri space, a few steps from the Centre Pompidou. The title translates as “I want them to stay” — a fitting wish for paintings so crowded with figures that they seem reluctant to let anyone leave.

A young painter between Rennes, Brussels and the stage

Palacios is a French-Argentine painter, born in Rennes in 1992, who lives and works in Brussels. She graduated in 2019 from the École de Recherche Graphique (ERG) in Brussels, where she studied both painting and performance — and she is also active internationally as a musician and performer. That double training matters: these are paintings made by someone who knows what it feels like to stand on a stage, and to watch one.

Her trajectory over the past few years has been brisk. She has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Derouillon in Paris (Snails don’t drool, They spit, 2024), Pizza Gallery in Antwerp, Gallery Vacancy’s presentation at Liste in Basel, and Panamax in Liège, and was included in Painting After Painting at S.M.A.K. in Ghent in 2025. Galerie Nathalie Obadia first showed her at its Brussels space; this is her first solo exhibition with the gallery in Paris.

Inside the theatre: what the paintings show

According to the gallery’s text, by Marie Chappaz, the new body of work treats painting as a theatre still inhabited by its performers. Figures, costumes and props fill the surface; the viewpoint slides from the wings to the stage to the stalls, so the viewer is sometimes an audience member, sometimes a stagehand, sometimes caught mid-scene. Costumes no longer entirely hide the people wearing them, and eyes — sometimes oversized — keep returning the viewer’s gaze. Looking, in other words, is itself one of the subjects.

Bodies are unstable here. Animal, ghostly and human forms turn into one another: a bird’s wing becomes tulle, plumage becomes fur. The gallery hears occasional echoes of Leonora Carrington’s bestiary, and the comparison is helpful — Carrington, too, painted a world in which species and identities leak into each other, and in which theatre, myth and domestic life share the same room.

One motif deserves a closer look on site: a recurring object resembling a biniou, the Breton bagpipe. In Brittany the instrument belongs to weddings and processions, but also to funerals. Palacios lets it hover between festivity and mourning — a small detail that holds the emotional temperature of the whole show.

Scraped, repainted, thinned: a surface with memory

For painters, the technique is the real draw. The gallery describes paint that is scraped back, painted over and thinned again and again, so that earlier gestures remain visible beneath later ones. The result is a surface that behaves like a stage after many performances — marked by traces of everything that happened there. And the work does not stop at the canvas: Palacios extends her painting onto books and even onto slices of bread, a gesture that is at once playful and pointed about what a painting support is allowed to be.

The artist sums up the spirit of the show in a line quoted by the gallery: “Struggle can take the form of a dance.” Embrace and confrontation, celebration and loss — the paintings refuse to separate them.

Why it matters

Figurative painting by artists born in the 1990s has been one of the busiest areas of the market, and it can be hard to tell staying power from fashion. What distinguishes Palacios is the specificity of her world — the theatre as a frame, the layered surfaces, the performer’s understanding of being watched. A show of nearly fifty works also gives collectors something rare: the chance to see a young artist’s language across scales and supports in one visit, rather than through a single work at a fair. Availability and prices are not published; enquire directly with the gallery.

Galerie Nathalie Obadia has been a fixture of the Marais gallery scene for decades, with additional spaces on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré and in Brussels. The Cloître Saint-Merri address puts the show within easy walking distance of the Pompidou area and the dense cluster of galleries on rue Chapon, rue Debelleyme and rue de Turenne — ideal for a December gallery walk.

Visiting information

Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Cloître Saint-Merri I & II, 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, 75004 Paris. 18 November – 24 December 2026. Open Monday to Saturday, 11am–7pm. Telephone +33 (0)1 42 74 67 68. The opening reception has not been announced on the gallery page; check with the gallery.

See the official exhibition page, our exhibition listing, and more Paris and London openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.