Bilal Hamdads paintings of Paris life show the thrill of new art when embedded within the grandeur of the old

All along Paris’s River Seine, private foundation money has been pouring into older Parisian institutions to make their buildings hospitable to large modern conceptual works. Crowds flock to the Bourse du Commerce, for example: once a grain and later a labour market, it has now been transformed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando into clean, white spaces. The same has happened at the recently opened Cartier Foundation, previously a hotel and commercial spaces. French architect Jean Nouvel has redesigned it as a vast contemporary art museum. Inside, it is all sharp lines and glass. The Petit Palais, in contrast, has preserved its fin-de-siècle curves and contorted ironwork. It’s calm and free to enter, as all Paris city museums are. But there is more to why the Petit Palais is a particularly Parisian exception to the ever-richer landscape of art along the Seine. In this grand old building, surprisingly, we encounter the “thrill of the modern”, as poet Charles Baudelaire defined it – when the fleeting occurrence meets the gravitas of the eternal in art. The fleeting occurrence in this instance is Paname, an exhibition by the emerging painter Bilal Hamdad. It is a brilliant display of Baudelaire’s magical combination: a fresh, vibrant take on city life installed amid the treasures of the museum’s permanent collection. The show features 20 of Hamdad’s works, including two specially created that were inspired by the museum’s collection. Born in Algeria in 1987 and now based in Paris, Hamdad is a regular visitor to the Petit Palais, where he has absorbed the lessons of great masters like Claude Monet, Paul Gaugin and Edgar Degas. His work draws from them in his compositions of ordinary life in contemporary cities. Solitude is a regular theme – as it was for Baudelaire who, like Hamdad, paid particular attention to the city’s labourers as he trudged along the Seine, toolbox in hand. In Hamdad’s glorious large-format oil paintings, we see women with bags on both shoulders waiting for the metro, and young men perched on railings waiting for whatever work or encounter might come their way. There are market scenes with older women selling corn on the cob from shopping caddies, and boys shifting contraband cigarettes to middle-class folk with their sunglasses and carefully strapped handbags. Bilal Hamdad has taken inspiration from Edouard Manet’s Un bar aux Folies Bergère (1882). Wikimedia Though Hamdad works from photographs, which he has described as his sketchbook, his works have a depth and intensity that transforms the ordinary into the mythical, casting the details of contemporary fashion and posture in a timeless, mysterious light. Most enigmatic in this show is the subtle reworking of Édouard Manet’s 1882 painting Un bar aux Folies Bergère, which hangs in the Courtauld Gallery in London. In the original, Manet plays with the effects of a large, tarnished mirror behind the bar. The mirror reflects the hidden back of a barmaid who looks blankly outwards alongside the bottles and other enticing offerings on the bar. In the reflection, Manet depicts her both as the object of our peering gaze and as removed from us, more delicate and perhaps more vulnerable. Hamdad’s Sérénité d’une ombre (2024) Adagp Hamdad’s Sérénité d’une ombre (Serenity of a shadow, 2024) develops the intimacy of Manet’s back view, pushing it further into the shadows. The brightly lit foreground shows us the bar, recognisable as Manet’s with an equally beautiful bowl of shiny oranges and a delicate rose composition. In the background, we can just make out a barman – dressed in a white shirt that suggests the crumples of a working day moulded onto a working body. The moment is wistful and withdrawn, yet it echoes with the clatter and confusion of the contemporary city. It hangs, as does all of Hamdad’s installation, among the eclectic galleries of the Petit Palais – a window onto a different sort of time. In this conversation between old and new, the viewer knows immediately that this work is here to last. Bilal Hamdad’s Paname is on at the Petit Palais in Paris until February 8 2026 Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.