Mathias Kiss’ Latest Exhibition is a Critical Examination of Our Aesthetic Addictions.

“Watch You Burn” by Mathias Kiss. Photos: Thomas Lannes.

Portrait by Nikolaz Le Coq.

Mathias Kiss’ home. Photos: Nikolaz Le Coq.

A fascinating new exhibition from Mathias Kiss, an artist who continues to disrupt classical design codes while never losing sight of their inherent beauty, has landed in Paris.

In “Watch You Burn”, Kiss transforms the basement of his studio into a dystopian fever dream—a milky white underground cube that feels both like a fallout shelter and a liminal dreamscape. The exhibition confronts us with the uncomfortable duality of our contemporary existence: visually seductive on the surface, yet ominously unstable at its core.

The exhibition begins with his iconic “Soleil Miroir” from his 2015 “I Have a Dream” installation, its cosmetic aesthetic playing against pixelated sky motifs. The journey intensifies with the enlargement of Kiss’s expired COVID vaccination certificate, before culminating in a flamboyant mirror screen symbolising ignition and decay. The ghostly silhouette of a chimney stands as a calcined trace of our possible extinction.

Nicolas Godin from AIR provides an original composition that complements the spatial experience.

For those unfamiliar with Kiss’s background, his approach comes from fascinating origins. Born in 1972 to Hungarian parents, he left school at 13 to train as a house painter with “Les Compagnons,” where he mastered traditional decorative techniques while restoring historic monuments like the Louvre. His journey from craftsman to artist crystallised in 2008 with “Sans90degrés,” his now-famous crumpled mirror that liberated him from technical dogmas.

What makes Kiss’s work so compelling is that despite its critical stance on our hyper-consumerist, narcissistic digital age, his pieces remain grounded in craftsmanship and a historical sense of beauty. There’s a metamodern sincerity here—looking to the past to illuminate possible futures free from present pitfalls.

This isn’t an exhibition about the darkness of the future, but rather what Kiss calls a “post-pop vision of a present dancing on the edge of a volcano”—a description that feels spot on for our current moment.

If you’re in Paris, the exhibition runs until June 13, 2025, at 151 avenue Jean-Jaurès. More info here.

“Watch You Burn” by Mathias Kiss. Photo: Thomas Lannes.

Mathias Kiss’ Paris atelier. Photos: Nikolaz Le Coq.

[Images courtesy of Mathias Kiss. Photography by Thomas Lanes and Nikolaz Le Coq.]