J'aime plus l'été

«It takes nothing thicker than the edge of a knife to pull happiness and melancholy apart.» - Virginia Woolf. Through the train window, memories emerge, elusive in the comings and goings of our thoughts. Ephemeral landscapes flow by, eluding our capture. As faces follow one another, fading and blending into a fragile tranquillity in which the contours dissolve. Everyone carries their own melancholy: some run away, trying to escape the pressure of memories and free themselves from the burdens of the past, others return home, where time has stopped. And still others are leaving, eager to rediscover the emotions of the past summer and reawaken the echoes of the southern embraces. A train journey can provide us this: to dip into the cathartic tenderness of melancholy, often so close to happiness. The works exhibited here share the common quality of being fragments of images, places and forms, evoking in artists and viewers something that feels familiar, like pieces of memories coming back through the train window. Bastien Pery, by altering layer after layer of his family archives in the Basque Country using an algorithm, sublimates moments of life doomed to be forgotten. From his memory, he recomposes the scenes on canvas and weaves the stories that surround them. A repertoire of forms and symbols belonging to the living unfolds in Victoire Inchauspé’s creations. Her works transcend archetypes by showing them missing, transforming the thistle into an empreinte and the snake into a simple molt. Pauline-Rose Dumas’ work unites forge and fabric in a singular poetry, opening the door to her creative process and revealing the profound intimacy of the work and the materiality that inhabits it. Sosthène Baran’s atmospheric landscapes have this impression of memory, ideal for melancholic overflow. Working with multiple layers, spectres emerge, playing with our perception and the ambiguity of what we want to see and what we think we see.   - Emma Brisot