Curated by Danniel Tostes
Fernando de la Rocque, Jean-Marie Fahy, Dara Maillard,
Lyz Parayzo, Wesley Roque, Almeida da Silva,
Vivianne van Singer and Martin Widmer
Everything begins with a line. A trace. A gesture.
Glue, cut, recut. Fold, turn, cross, reflect, write. Front and back. Two copies, maybe three. One, please. Ideas, secrets, desires, confessions. Mysteries and intimacies. Letters, words, sentences, magazines, note- books. Notes, directions, intentions, and their subversions. Love, anger, jealousy, tenderness. Poetry, music, voices, scripts, images. Everything leaves a mark and everything passes through paper.
So present in our gestures and daily exchanges, paper becomes the silent support through which thoughts, emotions and images circulate.
Paper appears everywhere: on our tables, in our bags, in offices, in the streets, in books, letters, notebooks and newspapers. Because of its accessibility and apparent fragility, it is often perceived as a banal or disposable object, a surface meant for temporary use.
For the artists invited to the exhibition Carte Blanche, this fragility becomes a space of experimentation, immediacy and risk. A line can be erased, a drawing can be torn, folded or remade. What begins as
a sketch or a test often becomes the place where the most direct and intimate gestures emerge. Precisely because it can be discarded, paper becomes one of the most personal surfaces for artistic expression.
In this exhibition, paper is not treated as a preliminary stage but as a conscious and deliberate choice. The artists gathered in Carte Blanche: Works on Paper approach paper as archive, process and experimenta- tion. Through drawing, printmaking, photography, poetry, sculpture and installation, the works explore the many ways in which this material can hold memory, gesture and thought.
Fragile yet resistant, paper reveals its force. By foregrounding a materi- al so present in everyday life, the exhibition invites us to reconsider its value, showing how something so light and ordinary can carry profound emotional, poetic and conceptual weight.
Bringing together works by Almeida da Silva, Dara Maillard, Fernando de la Rocque, Jean Marie Fahy, Lyz Parayzo, Martin Widmer, Vivianne Van Singer and Wes Roque, the exhibition reveals the many ways artists engage with paper today, as surface, structure, memory and gesture.
Text by Danniel Tostes