Traces de l'Invisible

Carte Blanche Exhibition — Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Paris

A poem that fades away under a downpour (Marcel Broodthaers), a painting that takes shape under a sheet (Angel Vergara), an empty plinth, reminiscent or becoming of an artwork (Fabrice Samyn), automatic drawings like so many traces of trauma and creed against the forgotten colonial history (Pélagie Gbaguidi), the drawn shadow of an invisible tree (Sophie Whettnall), elements of a forgotten Merzbau (Guy-Marc Hinant), receptacle artworks of the beyond (dospace), CCTV images that question the boundary between visibility and invisibility (Emmanuel Van der Auwera).

The exhibition Traces de l’invisible (Traces of the Invisible) plunges the viewer into the depths of the human soul, activating areas of inactive sensibilities. It unveils works by 9 Belgian artists and invites visitors to discover their unique approaches between mystery and fascination, traces of psycho-sensory experiences, transparency and opacity, presence and absence. By revealing the multiple temporalities of the work from its creation to its observation, the hegemony of the conscious and the everyday is transcended. Proof of this is that the form of the contemporary work of art extends beyond its material form. It is a connecting element, a principle of dynamic agglutination. Like a point on a line more or less visible to the naked eye.

The paradoxical title Traces de l’invisible questions the very genesis of art: would this make the invisible visible? Although this question will remain open, the exhibition bases and paraphrases the precepts of the phenomenology of perception and refutes the prejudice of the objective world and objective reality. In other words, it is not the visible that is decisive in a work, but rather the form of the connections that the artist and the viewer make. This approach considers perception in terms of the viewer’s communication or communion with the work.
It is this experience of “seeing as a feeling” that is offered to the visitor of Traces de l’invisible.

For more information, visit centrale.brussels/en/expos/traces-de-linvisible-centrale-paris/