Caroline Kent: Within the Veil, a Grammar

“Within the Veil, a Grammar” is a mural conceived by artist Caroline Kent on the occasion of the exhibition “Echo Delay Reverb” curated by Naomi Beckwith.

On the expansive wall of the Zone—the free access entrance hall of the Palais de Tokyo—Caroline Kent develops a visual vocabulary of colorful abstract forms that emerge from a unified black background, at times gaining actual depth and relief through the addition of three-dimensional wooden elements. They are further enriched with lines, dots, and irregular hand-made finishes. The artist composes as if creating a coded alphabet and thus imagines a cryptic language with its own grammar, syntax, punctuation, and diacritical marks. The repetition of elements and their variations invite a meditation on language as a terrain of multiplicity, opacity, play, and surprises. Her mural painting, conceived for the Palais de Tokyo, recalls through its dispersed and vibrant composition the unstable yet generative semantics that characterize many French and Francophone theoretical texts. Structured in two parts on either side of a central staircase, and serving as a prelude to the exhibition “Echo Delay Reverb”, the fresco also refers to the complex dynamics of exchange, diffusion, and transformation that lie at the heart of the exhibition.