Rien n’est permanent

Parliament is pleased to present the exhibition “Rien n’est permanent” from September 14th to November 5th, 2023. Approaching the work of a gallery as a cultural mission, “Rien n’est permanent” weaves links of continuity and exchanges between Parliament and the Baronian gallery, one founded almost 50 years after the other. Conceived as a two-part exhibition, each gallery exhibits its artists in the city of the other, chosen by the host gallery. Parliament starts the collaboration with a collective exhibition featuring five artists represented by the Baronian Gallery. In regards to a climate of constant changes and mutations inside and outside the artworld, “Rien n’est permanent” addresses the question of what resists time, from the perspective of the artworks themselves as well as the gallery’s activities.

As opposed to a linear approach of time, each artist is putting into perspective the very notion of contemporary, from the anticipations of present realities their works have drawn, to the traditions and histories they are rooted in, and the parallel line they construct on the side of present trends and codes. Sandison’s pioneering digital work – and the anticipatory questions raised on our changes in relationships with nature, language, signs and symbols – is anchored in the tradition of conceptual art. Marioni is perhaps the foremost contemporary exponent of a modern tradition that has its roots in the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School. Camara’s sculptures confront us with an unstaged theatre of objects and characters, made of past and present dreams, thoughts, stories and truths. Moving away from the spectacular, useful and perishable image of the mainstream media, Serralongue’s artistic approach favours out-of-frame images, long periods of time and collective movements. Thomas Zipp’s practice of paintings reveals existing links between art history, psychology and sciences, with an outside time and space sense of strangeness.

The second temporality is one of the two galleries – in an inverted chronology – raising the question of the ability of one to persist to time and of the other to anchor itself in it – in a common attempt to showcase the challenges of the image and its field of expression. Opening a gallery in spite of and in opposition to the overabundance of images, their simplifications and codifications, can be seen as a form of idealism, tracing a meeting point between the two entities.