"Silence"
Didier Goupy, Catherine Henriette, Gert Motmans

Exhibition: 24 November – 24 December 2022
Opening: Thursday, 24 November, 6-9pm
In presence of the artists

The exhibition "Silence" brings together the work of Didier Goupy, Catherine Henriette and Gert Motmans. The selected works are images of silence that are part of a universe marked by human absence. Although figures appear occasionally, they do not disturb the silent immensity that is at play in the works of these three artists.

Far from being an emptiness, silence should be considered as the overflow of an inaccessible world, a music of the infinitely small that no one listens to, unreal and worried by turns.

"Do trees make noise?" This is the question asked by Didier Goupy's photographs, which are gateways to the silent immensity of forests. The Fondations series draws up portraits of trees, framed in tight shots, just at eye level, which confront us with these beings inhabiting the world with us. This photographic work thus draws the contours of a plant intimacy that Didier Goupy nourishes with a poetic and personal observation of forests. The undergrowth immortalised by the artist has an almost supernatural character. Fondations reads like a chronicle of the silent life of trees in constant metamorphosis. One day ghostly silhouettes, the next day networks of graceful, budding branches, the images of these threatened giants tend towards abstraction.

Catherine Henriette, who recently joined the gallery's programme, is a French photographer whose series "Conte d'hiver and Conte d'été" draw an alternative image of China, wrapped in an infinitely calm and serene whiteness. The calligraphy of silence that Catherine Henriette sketches through these images is all the more striking because it is played out in a country that is nevertheless in the throes of frenetic change. The artist shows us a stopped time that leaves room for the emergence of dreams. The human figures, lost in the immensity of the places that surround them, appear in discrete touches, in the manner of traditional Chinese paintings. The light of the chromatic palette shows us the daily life of the inhabitants of North-East China over the course of the seasons, nimbed in a clarity that simplifies the colours and signs that make up the landscape. The result is that of a dull deafness, as if this lactescent glow swallowed the sounds around it.

Gert Motmans, a photographer from Antwerp, joins this collective project for his first exhibition in the gallery. His work in the form of collages revolves around the question of memory. The worlds he reconstructs from family photographs and magazine clippings are reminiscences. The works of Gert Motmans are imagined from these snippets and form a fantasy world that hints at a space-time that is both infinite and undefined. For him, silence is the residue of the whisper of an unknown world.