Marcelline Delbecq Silence Trompeur

For the past ten years, Marcelline Delbecq’s praxis has been slowly shifting from taking photos to taking notes. In her work, the issue of the image is incarnated in an essentially narrative form, a writing imbued with movements and freeze frames, past and present, fiction and reality.

For the show Silence trompeur/Deceptive Silence, the artist thwarts her own habits by dissociating photographs from words, and doing away with sound recordings (but without forgetting the voice) and thus creating from their respective silences that space which Jean-Luc Godard called: “The difference between a lock of hair and the dawn”—the space of the image.

The visual, mental, metaphorical, intangible, real and indescribable images will appear and disappear from work to work, fashioned by viewers’ imagination, memory and amnesia.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a cycle of readings out loud on Friday 30 January, Friday 13 February and Friday 6 March, at 7 pm:

-January 30th : L’Académie intérieure/The Inner Academy

Marcelline Delbecq is inviting Béatrice Gross (a New York-based exhibition curator and art critic) and Bertrand Schefer (a writer and film-maker, and joint curator of the exhibition Deceptive Silence) to freely interpret the nation of Inner Academy as discussed by Jeff Wall.* What images form us? To what extent is our future of thinking conditioned by our past of images? How do the images we remember and those we forget act?

All questions for which possible answers will be offered by a lecture by Béatrice Gross exploring the genealogies of artists, Bertrand Schefer’s reading from his latest book La photo au-dessus du lit/The Photo over the Bed (P.O.L., 2014) and Marcelline Delbecq’s reading from her book Oublier, voir/Forgetting, Seeing (2014).

*Jeff Wall, essais et entretiens, 1984-2001, Paris: Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 2001.