Silence

For its summer exhibition entitled Silence, the gallery is presenting a selection of works by its artists.

Some of the works evoke a silence synonymous with calm, emptiness and contemplation, and we are delighted to find visual correspondences between them.

Between soothing and anguishing, silence has many meanings, and so its symbolism and imagery are manifold.

It evokes the concentration of the creator and translates into a form of purity and radicalism in the resulting work. Such is the case with the bluish abstractions of Geneviève Asse, a series of landscapes of the Faroe Islands, captured on the spot in drypoint on zinc by the Dane Per Kirkeby, or a paper sky tinted with indigo by Éloïse Van der Heyden. It becomes dreamlike with the machine for listening to silence imagined by Bernard Moninot in his work entitled Silent listen. White is silence, and could be its colour, as illustrated by Dana Cojbuc's Trace de silence, materialized in the image by a trail of white flour in a charred landscape.

Silence is in the sleep of Éloïse Van der Heyden's Dormeur, or in the solitude of the silhouette venturing out at night into marshy water in Frédéric Poincelet's drawing. It is the absence of a living presence in a room with empty chairs drawn by the same artist, or on the worn wall of a family home photographed by Sophie Ristelhueber.

Silence also means shutting up or silencing, Frédéric Malette has chosen Les cris silencieux as the title for a series of drawings to convey the powerlessness of past and present cries of suffering.