Blanche ou l’oubli

Memory and oblivion, black and white, force and fragility, sleep and wakefulness meet in a show that unites photography, installations, films, drawings and sculptures from eight artists. This exhibition tries to assemble bits and fragments that testify of a battle against time and oblivion.

Blanche or Oblivion, the exhibition title quotes Louis Aragon‘s eponymous 1967 novel. In this ambiguous text, narration is put into peril between autobiographical quest and impossible novel-like fiction. The narrator perpetually loses control over his tale, and turns into the toy of an imaginary woman.

Each in his own way, the artists of this exhibition have responded with works specifically conceived for the exhibition. Sandra Aubry and Sébastien Bourg have created a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces can never, ever be put together. Grey, grayish like TV snow, it seems to be expanding over the wall like a swarming remembrance, a mental jungle appearing within the deepest recesses of memory.

Joao Vilhena‘s proposition is a large pierre noire drawing, the portrait of a 1940s actress, rendered as a stereoscopic view with distorted vision. Who is she? Has she already become a memory, a wandering shadow? Looking at her makes one feel seasick, off balance; presence is insidiously blurred out. Facing the drawing, nothing comes to mind but this line from the novel, “Look at me; avert your intense gaze away from its other stations, and turn it to me, Blanche…”

Lastly, with an installation relying on the palpable, physical matter of books, Marco Godinho has slimmed down a small folio, having chosen to unweave or unknit it like a too- closely-stitched sweater. Thinning out the book by taking the pages off, he has then sewn them back together into a rug, a map, or a forever fragmentary, carefully laid-out constellation.