For nearly 30 years, Auréle Ricard has questioned the world through a silhouette: that of a lost dog. A yellow bull terrier, which over time has become the icon of a generation wandering, saturated with information, emergencies, and solitude. A generation colonized by algorithms, quietly, without barricades or resistance—only this soft acceptance, characteristic of a civilization at the end of its cycle. Today, the dog sits down. And in this simple gesture, Auréle offers a new narrative, a silent disobedience.

The SIT DOWN series extends a body of work already deeply inhabited by the tensions of our time—social, ecological, emotional—by injecting a much-needed pause. Entering the terminal era of cultural capitalism, where everything must be immediately understandable and consumable, society has gorged itself, swallowing everything, like a host crumbling from the mouth. Faced with this 
silent liquidation, art needs an act of poetic sabotage. A sitting dog: this is what 
this new series presents, in opposition to a society that can no longer tolerate lack, waiting, or confusion.

LostDog: an icon born in the street

It all begins in New York, at the end of the 1980s. Auréle discovers a poster: “Lost Dog. Reward.” The starting point for a motif that will become obsessive — Available in bronze, resin, painting, and monumental installations. This yellow dog, named LostDog, is not an animal. He is a biting metaphor for our era, in which we have replaced the sacred with optimization algorithms. Here, a universal God Money presides over his prelates, with his orders, disciples, and worshippers. Our cathedrals have become air-conditioned data centers where servers hum, calculating our next desires. Contemporary humans have transformed as a prompt manager, a producer of calibrated content, shaping his image in the narcissistic mirror of social networks, bottle-fed on neoliberalism that has transformed love and friendship into dating apps and all desire into industrial pornography. Yet, from Tokyo to Paris, from the Centre Pompidou to the Shanghai World Expo, from the Bangkok Biennale to the French May in Hong Kong, from New York to Saint-Rémy de Provence, this icon has
crossed spaces like a witness to the extinction of the sacred. Today, she sits.

Sit Down: The Art of the Barycenter

In SIT DOWN, the dog no longer searches. He doesn't run, he doesn't watch. He sits. His gaze fixed, his silhouette curvy but calm. A sculpture of the present that questions our understanding of things. A manifesto at ground level. Because "Sit Down" is a well-known injunction—the one we address to an animal or a child... But Aurèle reverses the roles and speaks to us at us, in a gesture reminiscent of the German Expressionists whom the Nazis called 
"degenerates" — Kandinsky, Grosz, Dix, Kirchner, Beckmann — who knew that beauty is not born of conformity, but of rupture, of deviation, of derailment. What if we were to sit down? To settle down. To recenter ourselves, to find our barycenter, this point of balance in the process of becoming, to become Antigone again facing Creon: to disobey so as not to betray.

This series questions our relationship to time, to space, to the body in a society that shapes and satisfies our desires even before we formulate them. It reintroduces emptiness: the emptiness we must know how to inhabit in order to better perceive it, the emptiness that resists the commodification of thought, creativity, and the soul itself. It is impossible not to think of Giacometti's sculptural postures, Juan Muñoz's frozen silhouettes, or even Joseph Beuys's meditative stagings. With SIT DOWN, Aurèle enters this tradition of work that cannot be explained, but which imposes itself—by the quiet force of its presence, like an unpredictable apparition in the face of cultural standardization. The central piece: a seated dog, life-size, in International Aurèle Yellow, that acid and sunny yellow that signifies the artist's identity. At its side, sometimes, an empty chair. The invitation is clear: sit down. Resist.

Sit Down: Mental Safe Space

In an era that values movement, productivity, hyper-connection, efficiency, and conformity, SIT DOWN acts as a welcome break. A sculpture at eye level, designed to be viewed from an equal distance, far from commercial propaganda images. The sitting dog becomes a symbol of introspection in the face of a world in which liberal and technological forces are establishing the reign of standardization. It embodies the idea of a frugal luxury whose commodity has become scarce: that of taking time. A crucible of lost time in which germinates the refusal to be a servile scribe in the service of commercial law.

We Are All Lost Dogs
Under the calm, SIT DOWN asks essential questions: Where are we? What place do we want to occupy in this crowd of automatons when culture itself has become a market subject to the imperatives of profitability and growth?

What if we sat down to blossom and debunk conformity? Is the figure of the lost dog an interchangeable symbol of our time? The figure of the lost dog has established itself in Aurele's art as a witness to the Anthropocene: pollution, conflicts, solitude, and uprooting. But with SIT DOWN, this dog is more than a symptom; it becomes a key, a possible answer, a refuge of transcendence.

He doesn't show the way. He sits there, that's all. He sits enthroned, alongside our losses, our doubts, our memories, our forgetfulness. And If you look closely, to deploy this form of sabotage—all you have to do is sit down.

Arnaud Cheyssial

Aurèle
Born in 1963 in Paris.
Lives and works in Paris.

His work has been the subject of six solo exhibitions at the Lara Vincy Gallery:

1989 S.P.A (February 2 - March 2)
1990 The Mirrors of Modernity (January 19 - February 18)
1992 Aurèle & Aurèle presents SidaCosyKitsch Field Action Certified compliant/Interchangeable compliant space 
(December 1, 1992 - January 3, 1993)
2006 Life in Yellow. I.A.Y * / * International Aurèle Yellow (December 1, 2006 - January 27, 2007)
2011 Singin' in the Rain (October 14 - December 3)
2022 Be Water My Friend - Be Water My Love (May 19 - July 30)