It is increasingly common to find fashion houses at the world’s art fairs; it is rarer to find a fashion artistic director there as a curator. At this year’s Art Basel in Basel, Camille Miceli, the artistic director of Pucci, has done exactly that, assembling a focused solo presentation of paintings by Yves Laloy (1920–1999) at the stand of Paris’s Galerie 1900-2000. Around a dozen works, drawn from the gallery’s own holdings, make the case for an artist who has spent decades on the margins of the Surrealist story.
The gesture is telling. Rather than a conventional display, Miceli has conceived the booth as an immersive environment, one organized, in her words, more by instinct than by exhibition convention. For a figure whose career has moved fluidly between fashion, jewelry, and image-making, it reads less as a departure than as a continuation by other means.
Who was Yves Laloy?
Installation of Yves Laloy at Art Basel, courtesy of Camille Miceli and Galerie 1900-2000, photo by Jon Aich.
Laloy is one of the great loners of postwar French painting. Born in Rennes in 1920, he trained and worked as an architect before turning decisively to painting around 1950, when he began exhibiting in the Surrealist galleries of Paris. His real entry into history came in 1958, when André Breton, the movement’s chief theorist, discovered his work and championed it for the rest of his life, mounting an exhibition for him at the Galerie La Cour d’Ingres and writing its catalogue preface. Together with Konrad Klapheck, Laloy was among Breton’s last discoveries.
Breton went further: he chose Laloy’s wonderfully punning canvas Les petits pois sont verts… les petits poissons rouges… to illustrate the cover of the 1965 revised edition of his landmark Le Surréalisme et la peinture. Yet Laloy never formally joined the movement. He worked across a deliberately plural vocabulary — rigorous geometric constructions on one hand, undulating, cosmogonic and biomorphic worlds on the other — laced with wordplay and a deep fascination with Navajo sand painting, which Breton invoked to describe the almost ritual, world-ordering ambition of his canvases. The sea of his native Brittany runs through all of it.
Camille Miceli: A Fashion Eye Turns Curator
Installation of Yves Laloy at Art Basel, courtesy of Camille Miceli and Galerie 1900-2000, photo by Jon Aich.
Installation of Yves Laloy at Art Basel, courtesy of Camille Miceli and Galerie 1900-2000, photo by Jon Aich.
That mix of geometric precision and imaginative spontaneity is precisely what drew Miceli in. The project, she explains, grew out of a personal discovery rather than an institutional brief.
“This project is particularly exciting for me,” says Miceli. “Thanks to David Fleiss and Emmanuel Perrotin, I learned about Laloy and was immediately drawn to his art. Curating these works, I imagined a visual narrative driven more by instinct and my passion for art than by traditional exhibition codes.”
“I imagined a visual narrative driven more by instinct and my passion for art than by traditional exhibition codes,”
—Camille Miceli
Installation of Yves Laloy at Art Basel, courtesy of Camille Miceli and Galerie 1900-2000.
Installation of Yves Laloy at Art Basel, courtesy of Camille Miceli and Galerie 1900-2000, photo by Jon Aich.
The resonance is easy to trace. Laloy’s shifts between repetition and spontaneity, his allegorical motifs and geometric scaffolding, map onto a sensibility Miceli has expressed both as Pucci’s artistic director and in her own creative output — a way of building images that prizes rhythm, color, and emotion over rules.
Instinct Over Exhibition Codes
Installation of Yves Laloy at Art Basel, courtesy of Camille Miceli and Galerie 1900-2000, photo by Jon Aich.
Installation of Yves Laloy at Art Basel, courtesy of Camille Miceli and Galerie 1900-2000, photo by Jon Aich.
Miceli frames her participation as an experiential reintroduction to Laloy: a space that flows with rhythm and color rather than the measured cadence of a museum hang. It extends a practice she has been developing for several years, she has contributed scenography to Art Basel Miami Beach through Pucci across recent editions, while pushing it beyond the orbit of fashion altogether. Here she positions herself as a contemporary cultural figure able to build connections across disciplines, and lets Laloy’s audacious compositions reappear, as the organizers put it, reawakened and as bold as ever.
The Galerie 1900-2000 Connection
Installation of Yves Laloy at Art Basel, courtesy of Camille Miceli and Galerie 1900-2000, photo by Jon Aich.
Installation of Yves Laloy at Art Basel, courtesy of Camille Miceli and Galerie 1900-2000, photo by Jon Aich.
The presentation is anchored by Galerie 1900-2000, the Paris gallery long associated with Surrealism and Dada and directed by David Fleiss, whose holdings supplied the works on view. It was through Fleiss, alongside gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin — who staged Laloy’s first monographic gallery exhibition in 2022 — that Miceli first encountered the artist. The collaboration gives the booth its quiet authority: a curatorial intervention by an outsider, grounded in one of the deepest private inventories of the period.
The Essentials
What: A solo presentation of c. 12 paintings by Yves Laloy, curated by Camille Miceli
Where: Galerie 1900-2000 stand, Art Basel, Basel
When: Art Basel 2026 (June)
Artist: Yves Laloy (b. Rennes, 1920; d. Cancale, 1999)