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Franck Scurti
Secret Works for Secret Places
13.11.25 — 15.02.26

Art today is more than ever pushed toward a regime of hyper-visibility.

This project takes the opposite path. It proposes a strategic shift: pulling the work out of official circuits and reintroducing it into the cracks of the everyday — places that aren’t sanctified, that aren’t identified as “artistic.”

Fragments found in the street — cardboard, plastic, discarded objects — become the ground for a minimal, procedural form of painting. On these humble materials, already cast off by the production chain, I bring together and paint two systems of signs: temporal intertitles lifted from a cartoon (fragments of a globalized, standardized narrative) and representations of print color tests (CMYK/RGB), the technical calibration codes used by the print-image industry. Painted here, these signs are emptied of content; they point to obsolescence and reproducibility, two pillars of the visual economy.

The time cards, borrowed from the world of animation, become markers of a suspended, skewed, elastic temporality. They name the in-betweens — the forgotten moments, delays, ellipses, and narrative non-sites.

At the center of the system is Pony, a point of reference. Situated in Montreuil, this node acts as a resonance point, gathering exchanges, cataloguing the time cards, their locations, and their itinerary.

The works are not “exhibited.” They’re scattered through everyday spaces: a grocery store, a bookshop, a salon, an office, a place you pass through. Some are easily accessible; others require effort: asking a cashier, calling someone, posing a question, making an appointment.
The location of each piece is communicated, but it guarantees nothing. It doesn’t orient; it disorients. What’s offered is the address; what’s withdrawn is certainty. Access remains conditional. You have to play along.

What becomes of our perception of time, image, and trace in a world saturated with flows, disposable objects, and accelerated narratives?

This project doesn’t propose an aesthetics of disappearance, but a politics of active withdrawal. The work becomes an index of a social relation, not a finished product. It exists in the residue, in the interval, in what cultural capitalism discards: the invisible, the waiting, the useless, the unprofitable. It is a poetic counter-visibility.

Secret Works for Secret Places is an invitation to slow down — to let art happen in the interval, between the familiar and the unseen, the ordinary and the impossible.

This project cannot be “visited.”
It is passed through.

It is encountered, or missed.

Franck Scurti, 2025

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Exhibition view, Franck Scurti, Secret Works for Secret Places, 2025, Pony, Montreuil.

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Franck Scurti, EARLY THE NEXT MORNING…, 2025, aluminium, acrylic paint, 55 × 4 × 3 cm.

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Exhibition view, Franck Scurti, Secret Works for Secret Places, 2025, Pony, Montreuil.

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Franck Scurti, PLEASE STAND BY, 2025, Ticket à gratter, peinture acrylique, 10,2 × 7 cm.

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Franck Scurti, TWO VERY BORING MINUTES LATER…, 2025, steel, gesso, acrylic paint, 12 × 59,5 × 5,5 cm.

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Franck Scurti, MEANWHILE…, 2025, copper, acrylic paint, 53 × 6,5 × 2 cm.

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Franck Scurti, LIMITED TIME ONLY!, 2025, concrete, acrylic paint, 6 × 30 × 7,5 cm.

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Franck Scurti, ONE MINUTE, THIRTY-SEVEN SECONDS LATER…, 2025, plastic, acrylic paint, 57,5 × 11,5 × 7 cm.

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Franck Scurti, MANY FRAME-BUILDING ATTEMPTS LATER…, 2025, Bois, clou, peinture acrylique, 42 × 20,5 × 7 cm.

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Franck Scurti, PLEASE STAND BY, 2025, scratch card, acrylic paint, 10,2 × 7 cm. 

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Exhibition view, Franck Scurti, Secret Works for Secret Places, 2025, Pony, Montreuil.

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Franck Scurti, TWELVE SLEEPLESS HOURS LATER…, 2025, wood, gesso, acrylic paint, 30,5 × 22 × 7,5 cm. 

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Franck Scurti, MUCH, MUCH, MUCH LATER, 2025, plastic, acrylic paint, 30 × 18,5 cm. 

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Franck Scurti, TWELVE SECONDS LATER, 2025, steel, orange red-lead paint, acrylic paint, 9 × 44 × 4 cm.

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Franck Scurti, ONE DEBT TO SOCIETY LATER…, 2025, wood, acrylic paint, 74 × 75 × 1.5 cm.

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Exhibition view, Franck Scurti, Secret Works for Secret Places, 2025, Pony, Montreuil.

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Franck Scurti, LATER IN THE VOID…, 2025, 13 Av. de la Résistance, Paris.

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Franck Scurti, ONE PATHETIC SOB-STORY LATER…, 2025, 66 Av. Daumesnil, Paris.

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Franck Scurti, DAY FOUR, 2025, 16 rue de Rivoli, Paris.

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Franck Scurti, ONE SHIFT LATER…, 2025, 229 rue Saint-Honoré, Paris.

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Franck Scurti, A FEW INCHES LATER, 2025, 168 Av. de Choisy, Paris.

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Franck Scurti, ONE JOURNEY THROUGH SPACE LATER…, 2025, 117 rue de Patay, Paris.

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Franck Scurti, ONE LOAD SCREEN LATER, 2025, 47 rue Doudeauville, Paris.

Franck Scurti
Born in Lyon in 1965.
Lives and works in Paris.

If we could find him a fatherhood, Franck Scurti would claim to follow conceptual art as well as Fluxus's poetry, which taught him « to watch objects, to analyse them, to lose them in themselves, and then to reappraise them ». His work, inspired by everyday reality and international news, makes good use of the shapes produced by the consumption and urban civilization world.

His work has been exhibited at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Fondation Zimei (Montesilvano), CCCOD (Tours), Musée d'art Contemporain (Moscow), Centre Pompidou Malaga, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), CA2M - Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (Madrid), SMAK - Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (Gent), Power station of art (PSA) collection de la Fondation Cartier (Shanghai), MAMCO - Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain (Geneva), Queen Elizabeth Hall Riverside Terrace (London), Musée d'Art Contemporain de Strasbourg, Musée Picasso (Valauris), Magasin-CNAC (Grenoble), Vitrines Hermes (Tokyo), Centre National de la Photographie (Paris), MAC/VAL (Vitry-sur-Seine), BPS22 (Charleroi), IAC - Institut d'Art Contemporain (Villeurbanne), Kunsthaus Baselland (Muttenz), Bloomberg Space (London), MAN - Museo d'Arte Provincia di Nuoro, Museum of Contemporary Art (Bucharest).
Photo credits
Exhibition views: photo Kleinefenn
Reproductions of the works: Pony, Montreuil

Courtesy of the artist and Pony, Montreuil

Header image: Exhibition view, Franck Scurti, Secret Works for Secret Places, 2025, Pony, Montreuil. (detail)

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