About - Julien Boudet
Julien Boudet builds his work from things he collects - auto parts, sports gear, branded fragments, action figures - treating them as field notes from contemporary life. The act of collecting is research: each object carries a network of meanings that he reconfigures through photography, sculpture, and installation. By shifting context, Boudet examines consumer culture where it’s least expected, testing how branding shapes desire, status, and identity.
Raised in Sète on the Mediterranean, his sensibility blends coastal clarity with the wit of ’90s French advertising and the visual vocabularies of sport, hip-hop, and motorsports. Recurring themes - authenticity and counterfeit, prestige and utility - are not moral binaries but mirrors of the same system. Boudet also investigates the contemporary upheavals driven by globalization and overconsumption: the aesthetics of logistics, the migration of goods and images, and the environmental, social, and psychological wear they leave behind. For him, these objects are symptoms of a moment - physical, emotional, economic, and political at once. Rather than sanitize them, he lets their histories show, turning commerce into a language for storytelling.
Alongside his studio practice, Boudet leads Bleu Mode, a creative studio applying the same concept-first, image-driven approach to collaborations, campaigns, and spatial experiences. Across artworks and commissions alike, his projects reveal how the icons of luxury and sport can be read as artifacts - evidence of what we value, and how those values mutate under the pressures of a global market.
