Bodega comes to Paris

César Bouttier runs Bodega, a collective of young collectors that stages emerging artists in beautiful, non-gallery spaces.

On Thursday 2 July he opened a Paris show for Elias Loudiyi, a Franco-Moroccan painter fresh out of the Beaux-Arts who has just won the Prix Agnès b., and whose unsettling, photorealistic family portraits sit right on the line between France and Morocco.

Loudiyi is already on the radar of those who watch the space closely. The influential review Diptyk, edited by Meryem Sebti, publishes his work, and his paintings are beginning to find their way onto serious walls.

Fresh from the Beaux-Arts, freshly garlanded, and suddenly very much in demand.

It was a private view, and a beautiful one: the kind of evening that tends to mark the moment an artist stops being a discovery and starts being a name. ■