Constance Allen, Sabine Banovic, Fabiana de Barros, Valérie Belin,
Mila Mayer, Corinne Mercadier, Catherine Rebois and Viviane van Singer
It is possible to trace the origin of this brief chronology of silence back to 1958, when Yves Klein inaugurated the exhibition Le Vide at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris. Klein completely emptied the gallery and installed no artwork. More precisely, the work is this emptiness—the absence of what should be, appear, or disturb.
We could continue this narrative by going back a few more years, to 1952. The scene is Woodstock, New York. The poet, musician, and composer John Cage performs his work 4’33” Silence for the first time. The score gives precise instructions to those who must follow and interpret it: produce no sound, make no movement, in three movements. The result is four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence—the paradigm of all silences.
Barry’s piece Closed Gallery, in 1969, consisted of an exhibition invitation on which one could read, “The gallery will remain closed for the entire duration of the exhibition.”
All these radical actions demonstrate the existence of certain contradictions whose relevance—despite the passage of time and the avant-garde conditions surrounding them—cannot be doubted: the inherent contradiction of the myth of the imperceptible, inaudible, invisible artwork. Silence or emptiness exists only in relation to its opposite: emptiness does not exist without the object, just as silence does not exist without sound. In these works, silence is the ultimate object; it is the response to a world in which everything, or almost everything, amounts to a lack of communication—except, perhaps, for an excess of words.
Nouveau Départ: 4’33’’ seeks to analyze the relationship between silence and art from a different perspective: silence does not refer to the result, as the negation of the work, but as an integral and fundamental part of the process that constitutes it. (Death to the artwork, long live the process!) Silence may be a way of telling stories.
Nothing corresponds to appearances; everything is a question of relationships and references, of repeated motifs suggesting continuous movement. No artwork has a fixed starting point; no time is complete or whole. The connection between the ten artists in Nouveau Départ: 4’33’’ is not solely the use of similar techniques or a shared aesthetic, but rather an attitude linking them to insinuation, play, allusion, seeing, and being seen—turning the spectator into an uneasy guest.
That said, the exhibition is organized into three cores that explore different conceptual aspects: different meanings of silence—silence as a space of non-communication, as a site of action, and finally, as a space of intimacy.
Thus, the works presented range from Catherine Rebois’ radical bodily experimentation to the intimate space of Corinne Mercadier, and to the baroque silverwork of Valérie Belin. This contrasts with the formal suggestion of Sabine Banovic—the same precise, mathematical opposition implied by the module repeated infinitely in the air by Constance Allen. Repeated endlessly, obsessively, the obsessions are silent: Sei tutto tuo padre, sei tutto tua madre—an uncomfortable truth facing the mirror; and an obsessive, repetitive background song, the same phrase, the same refrain, along with Vivianne Van Singer’s reflexes, and Mila Mayer’s images, which also testify to silence: obsolete objects, serving no purpose, since no one speaks. This conversation—what they say to each other or what we have said to ourselves—does not even exist in Fabianna de Barros’ video, as her characters do not look at each other, too focused on continuing to move, climb, ascend, without knowing exactly where or why.
Here nothing corresponds to appearances; here everything is a matter of relationships, of whispered obsessions during a gray afternoon repeated a thousand times. Art is a vocation of transparency. To create in order to return, to see things again or to see them as never before. To see them again also means to say them again, or to shout them, in the empty space of a muffled cry.