Personal Picks: Adèle Ariès

Personal Picks is a new format where someone from our team selects four artworks that resonate with them on a personal level. From intimate favorites to unexpected discoveries, each selection offers an individual, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the gallery’s evolving universe—one artwork at a time.

Next up: Adèle Ariès. As Paris Gallery Director and Manager of Exhibitions across all our spaces, Adèle inhabits a role that is both expansive and deeply personal. She bridges the gallery’s international program with a curatorial sensitivity that reflects her own way of experiencing art. For Adèle, exhibitions are not only about presenting works, but also about creating spaces of encounter, between artist and viewer, thought and emotion, form and resonance.

With her Personal Picks, Adèle invites us into a more intimate perspective, sharing her own reflections on what safe spaces mean to her.

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Everywhere I go, and in every house I live in, I instinctively try to create a cocoon for myself, a space where I can feel centered, balanced, and at ease. I carry this need with me as a constant: to build safe corners through small rituals, familiar textures, certain gestures, or even the presence of specific colors and environments. These habits allow me to reconnect with myself, and they remind me that a comfort zone is not tied to a single place, but to a way of inhabiting the world. For this reason, I chose to take the idea of the cocoon, of safe spaces where we can care for ourselves, as the common thread of this selection.

Jon Koko’s Ribersborg brings me to such a space of retreat. Its muted tones and delicate lines evoke a quiet seaside, a place where you can connect with nature and with your own body, taking the time to nurture it and to recharge. There is a serenity in his work that makes me feel I could breathe more slowly just by looking at it.

Rala Choi’s Holding Together reminds me that home can also be found in another person. The tenderness of the embrace he captures speaks of the kind of human connections that form the safest spaces of all. To me, it’s about those relationships where you don’t need to pretend, where you can simply be, and in that honesty, find the deepest self-care, love, and respect.

With House on a Hill, Nina Silverberg opens a window into an imaginary place of refuge. There is a touch of melancholy in her painting, as if the house waits quietly while the rain falls outside, protecting whoever inhabits it. It carries the dreamlike quality of a shelter that may not exist, but that we all long for, a reminder of how comfort and imagination intertwine.

Finally, James P. Morse’s Lake Town conveys the life of a small community in winter. The work speaks of simplicity: shared habits, slow rhythms, the kind of everyday gestures that make us feel alive. There is warmth in the coexistence of people and their environment, a vision of a place where life is in harmony with nature, and where its pace allows us to savor it as it should be.

Taken together, these works map out my personal vision of the cocoon: a comfort zone that exists in solitude, in human connection, in imagination, and in community. They remind me that safe spaces are not only where we withdraw, but also where we return to ourselves.
Adèle Ariès