The boundless evocation of A tenderness in time accompanies the September solo show, staged in Paris at Sans Titre Gallery in collaboration with John Douglas Millar and Nadia Hebson. With the delicacy and intellectual honesty that so strongly define him, British artist and writer Paul Becker (Windsor, 1967) once again seems to ask himself «what it means to create art and beauty when bombs are falling».

His most familiar pastel atmospheres, at once pasty and ethereal in touch, embrace melancholy, unresolved presences and figures, like the passing of a time of suspension, anxious and terrible.

As Becker confided in a 2025 interview with Victoria Lucas, «I make my work […] instinctively and deliberately. Things work best when these two aspects coexist. […] My drawing and […] painting come from this idea of ‘not knowing’ as a modus operandi, from strategic failure as a way of letting the work be surprising and establish an existence of its own». 

Faced with a reality that is presumptuous and smug in its most reckless choices and actions, the pictorial universes Paul Becker explores strike like luminous shards flung from other worlds, brightly alive to the possibility of cultivating silence and thinking through the most varied actions. Reasoning, inclinations and overwhelming thoughts seem to swim and take place in the minds of those figures, shown in the intimacy of a pause or of the deepest contemplation. 

This series of paintings speaks of abandonment and intimacy, drawing on a rich, layered imagery full of references that reach us from far away. The result is an aesthetic experience that invites you to come closer slowly, without hurry. The forms seem almost to sing and the colors evoke different feelings, sometimes even opposite ones, but that is exactly why they leave room for more than one way of reading what we see. The works are housed in a place that resembles a nest, designed with the care reserved for a cocoon. Inside, everyone can build their own interpretation, make it their own, and come away with something that dazzles and warms at once.

As John Douglas Millar wrote in the critical text accompanying the Paris exhibition, «[…] suspension, potential delightfully coiled like a snake, or like the curl of cigarette smoke, one element fading into another, synesthesia, a pinprick in the finger makes a rose bloom in the eye».