Running until October 10, 2026, Belgian artist Johan Creten’s eleventh solo exhibition with Perrotin, Les Chiens de Pavlov at 76 rue de Turenne in Paris, transforms roughly a hundred obsolete computers collected over four decades by his late father into a towering sculptural memorial examining modern technological dependency and memory.
An Inheritance of Obsolete Machines
For forty years, Johan Creten’s father amassed early computers, storing them in a dedicated building where they sat stacked behind curtains and piled upon furniture in dense, silent stacks. Following his father’s passing three years ago, the family was left with roughly a hundred outdated machines covered in dust and abandoned data. Creten’s sister eventually engaged someone to inventory each machine with the help of artificial intelligence, creating a striking paradox where the newest intelligence read the oldest, unreadable hardware.
As Creten notes regarding the three-year interim before tackling the archive, the computers became an immediate allegory for his father’s fading memory during his final years. At the center of the Paris gallery space, these beige casings are stacked into a massive wall that functions simultaneously as an archive and a personal monument. Tucked among the hardware, the artist’s own ceramics and bronzes sit quietly, offering a tactile reflection on grief, loss, and technological accumulation.
The Pavlovian Echo and Artistic Vocabulary
The exhibition’s title draws directly from Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s late 19th-century conditioning experiments, where dogs learned to salivate at the sound of a bell. Creten poses a direct question to contemporary society regarding modern triggers: the ping of a notification, the buzz of a dating app, and the automatic reach of a thumb toward a screen. Rather than offering a dry lecture on digital habits, the Belgian artist surrounds his central installation with familiar motifs.
Flowers continue to serve as his visual Trojan horse, forming seductive feminine bodies and torsos that mask sharper commentaries within. In Odore di Femina – Golden Rain (2025) and the glazed stoneware hourglass New Glory – Time and time again – Le Sablier (2024–2025), finished in gold luster, beauty acts as a strategy to draw viewers in close before confronting them with vanity and the passage of time. Returning to older works like the bronze Miami Eagle / Le Con-dort (2002–2026), first conceived in Florida twenty-four years ago, Creten continuously re-evaluates his practice in line with Umberto Eco’s premise in The Open Work that art represents an open field of possibilities rather than fixed assumptions.
Historical Collaboration and the Butcher’s Window
Quiet revelations anchor the exhibition’s drawings, including two sheets created alongside his father back in 1988. Together, father and son wrote small programs generating computer images that the young artist then integrated into his hand-drawn lines, featuring a skull with pixels in place of a brain. This early collaboration highlights a preoccupation with machines thinking in our place.
The conceptual breakthrough for the entire show emerged from an ordinary moment during installation. While walking home through Saint-Paul in a gloomy state, Creten spotted lambs’ brains in a butcher’s window, recalling childhood Wednesdays of eating lambs’ brains on toast. Cooking them brought to mind the phrase “fried brain,” a term also used when an electronic component or computer burns out, bridging his father’s fading memory, the dead machines, and the 1988 pixelated skull.
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Artist | Johan Creten |
| Gallery | Perrotin, 76 rue de Turenne, 75003 Paris, France |
| Exhibition Dates | Until October 10, 2026 |
| Milestone | Eleventh solo show with Perrotin, sixth in the Paris space |
Visitors are invited to sit on the artist’s dedicated Seven Virtues seating elements, slowing down to examine the reflexive pull of modern technology. In the final rooms, the noise dissolves into stillness—a son’s goodbye and a warning delivered through fire, gold, and flowers.
