Press release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Le Pigalle, Paris
13 October 2026

Marcelino Hooi presents: my best friend Paris. A solo show in the Marais

Central themes: image capture, memories, urban life, Paris

Paris based painter Marcelino Hooi presents my best friend Paris, a solo pop-up show of 8 oil paintings, on view from 21st to 23rd of October at 66 rue Charlot in the Marais, Paris. The show takes place during Paris Art Week, coinciding with Art Basel Paris 2026.

my best friend Paris brings together 8 works from Marcelino Hooi’s Camera Roll Art collection. Large and medium-scale oil paintings painted from personal everyday smartphone photos. The works depict five recurring motifs. Illustrating the commonly lived experience of a young adult in Paris.

The exhibition title operates as a double portrait. my best friend Paris can be read as a series of the artist’s best friend, named Paris, or as a declaration to the city itself, having become his closest companion in the absence of real human connection. An absence that often hits young adults after moving to the big city. Hooi lives his life between Amsterdam and Paris, moving between two worlds continuously without fully belonging to either. The paintings don’t confirm or resolve the ambiguity of the title. They simply show what his smartphone camera roll holds.

Hooi’s practice centers on Camera Roll Art, a framework he developed arguing that the smartphone has transformed consumer photography from a deliberate act of memory into reflexive, compulsive, accumulation. Images captured automatically, stored without consequence, and never revisited. Painting from the camera roll is his response: a slow, deliberate act of selection that restores time and attention to images that were never meant to serve a long term purpose. His essay Camera Roll Art and the Rot of Image Capture has been submitted for publication.

“I want you to recognise my paintings as the everyday snapshot you could have taken, and to see it in a way you haven’t before: without its usual fleetingness, but with weight instead. The weight of time spent, of labor, of the countless decisions it took to bring this image to a final painting.”
- Marcelino Hooi, 2026

About the artist
Marcelino Hooi (b. 1993, Netherlands) is a painter based between Amsterdam and Paris. His practice centers on Camera Roll Art, a self developed framework about image culture and contemporary art. His first group exhibition, Les Gars de Frochot, took place at Hotel Le Pigalle, Paris, in February 2026.

my best friend Paris will be on display at 66 rue Charlot, 75003, Paris from the 21st of October until the 23rd of October

my best friend Paris
21 - 23 October 2026
daily from 11:00 - 18:00
66 rue Charlot
75003, Paris

www.marcelinoh.com
caffezeno@gmail.com