With a selection of artworks by :
Pierre ARDOUVIN / Jean-Charles BLAIS / Agustin CARDENAS / Chu Teh CHUN / Jean DUBUFFET / Alberto GIACOMETTI / José LEVY / Kimiyo MISHIMA / Bernard PLOSSU / Arnulf RAINER / Mimmo ROTELLA / Sterling RUBY / Gérard SCHNEIDER / Kiki SMITH / Hiroshi SUGIMOTO / Georges VALMIER / Bernar VENET / Claude VIALLAT
Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
In a deep and tenebrous unity,
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.
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Charles Baudelaire, « Correspondances », in Les Fleurs du mal (1857), translated by William Aggeler in The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954).
In “Correspondances,” Baudelaire describes a world in which nothing is entirely mute. Forms, sounds, materials — everything seems to speak to one another, to answer one another, weaving bonds between them that the eye does not immediately grasp. Nature appears there as a temple that murmurs, but in “confused words,” as though meaning always remained slightly withdrawn, both accessible and elusive at once.
It is this same tension that guided the conception of In the Shadow of Forms. Not an exhibition on form as such — on contour, figure, or structure — but on that strange moment when form hesitates: when it begins to exist, or perhaps begins to disappear. This threshold, fragile and fleeting, lies at the heart of the project.
The works gathered here are born from gestures, traces, materials, and sometimes from voids. Some bring forth a presence from a dark ground; others hold something in suspension, between apparition and erasure. A fragment, a tear, an imprint, a worn surface — all of these can become, under certain conditions of light and gaze, a presence in their own right. Something that unsettles, displaces, and resists being fully named.
What the exhibition seeks is perhaps precisely this: the moment when we think we recognize something, and yet something still escapes us. The silent part of matter. The restrained energy of a gesture. The floating memory of an image. These works do not necessarily resemble one another, but they enter into dialogue — just as sensations in Baudelaire answer one another without ever merging.
In the shadows, form does not disappear. It persists otherwise — more uncertain, perhaps, but also closer to what the gaze seeks without always being able to grasp.
