Matter of Fact

    ”Thus, by day she would weave at her great web, and by night, by torchlight, she would unpick it.”

(Homer, The Odyssey, Book II)


    We are pleased to present Matter of Fact, Capucine Gros’s second exhibition at the gallery, on view from September 6 to December 20 at Jean-Kenta Gauthier Vaugirard. Born in 1989, Capucine Gros — whose work, marked by the recurring motif of the map, reflects an affinity for data, transcription, and its interpretations — has for two decades developed a resolutely conceptual practice in which each project calls for its own temporality, form, and materials.

    Since 2020, Capucine Gros has been producing White Flags, a project in which wool and cotton threads are woven into textiles mounted on flagpoles. These flags — seven of which are presented in the exhibition — display equations woven in white thread, most of which appear to be arithmetic errors. Between the threads, the artist has inserted thin paper scrolls — newspapers or printed press articles — whose density prevents reading and whose presence subtly distorts the regularity of the weave. These sources report on prisoner exchanges. For many years, Capucine Gros has been scrupulously collecting this information, which visually agglomerates in the material of the works; the titles — White Flags (2021: Chinese / Canadian) (2024) or White Flags (2020: Iranian / Australian) (2024) — evoke these facts. Capucine Gros’s practice often begins with the visualisation of significant quantities. For more than ten years, she has been recounting each year the number of countries that issue passports, in the form of artist books and performance (Approximately 199, 2012 – ongoing). She has also covered monumental rolls of paper with ink dots, each corresponding to an inhabitant of cities where she has lived (Every One, in Bucharest and New York in 2018, in Savannah in 2019, in Shanghai in 2019–2020). The equations of White Flags thus form a geopolitical accounting of lives that the artist shares by patiently weaving her canvases.

    Equations appear again on the walls. With Universal Values (2020 – ongoing), a project undertaken in parallel with White Flags, Capucine Gros reiterates these geopolitical equations — the accounting of prisoner exchanges — by filling the numbers with flag patterns embroidered in cross-stitch. A domestic and repetitive manual technique, cross-stitch is a rudimentary process: each stitch is a cross of a defined colour, like a pixel; the canvas is stretched over a hoop, whose front and back are akin to positive and negative. This craft resembles computer code — binary and simple — and constitutes, for the artist, a salutary method of representing.

    Amid the White Flags, Capucine Gros has placed on plinths works in folded paper in the form of maps. New Worlds (2024 – ongoing) are like tools that the artist has made by agglomerating newspapers or printed articles from opposing media sources. Each work is anchored in a country: thus, the combination of The New York Times and Fox News forms New Worlds (USA) (2025), while the merging of Il Manifesto and Libero constitutes New Worlds (Italy) (2024). Paper pulp as reconciliation, and the map as an attempt to navigate.

    With Matter of Fact, Capucine Gros presents us with a conceptual and slow art, where artisanal processes — weaving, embroidery, papermaking — through the structures inherent to them and the temporalities they impose, become instruments of thought.


— Jean-Kenta Gauthier, September 2025