“Because Blanche, she doesn’t exist, not as a character of the novel, not as a black Madonna. I’m telling you: I don’t imagine her, I don’t create her. I feel for her in the dark side of myself.” - Aragon

Alberta Pane Gallery presents Blanche or Oblivion, an exhibition curated by Léa Bismuth (essay available from September), starting September 11th at our new gallery space in 64 rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth.

Memory and oblivion, black and white, force and fragility, sleep and wakefulness meet in a show that unites photography, installations, films, drawings and sculptures from eight artists.

“It all started with a book I’ve read ten years ago, leafed through in an old house, sitting next to a large window that opened to the horizon. The book has left a mysterious impression, a background noise to stay with the reader for a long time.

This exhibition tries to assemble bits and fragments that testify of a battle against time and oblivion. Here and there, clues will be given. Traces of a passage. Frameworks for spaces and moments. Writing in motion before the freeze.

Blanche or Oblivion: The exhibition title quotes Louis Aragon’s eponymous 1967 novel. In this ambiguous text, narration is put into peril between autobiographical quest and impossible novel-like fiction. The narrator perpetually loses control over his tale, and turns into the toy of an imaginary woman.

Whether her name be Blanche or Black Madonna, she is only a protean prism by which Aragon tells of his own love story: “Blanche, to make Elsa forget Elsa”, he writes at the end of the book.

But Blanche doesn’t exist, and nothing remains of the great novel that tells it all as if trying to put together the pieces of scattered existence, nothing but a desperate sketch, a list, an excessive attempt to gather everything and the disturbing madness of the result.

Some nights we say are white (in French: “blanche”), i.e. sleepless. They are the most terrible and ghostly, but they also favour the concretisation of ideas, the creation of poems and artworks. And, each in his own way, the artists of this exhibition know how to express those moments that are nourished by hunger and exhaustion, when the shutters are half closed and lives go into hiding.” - Léa Bismuth

Galerie Alberta Pane

64 rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth
Paris 75003 France
Tel. +33 (0)1 43065872
info@galeriealbertapane.com
www.galeriealbertapane.com

Opening hours

Tuesday - Saturday
From 11am to 7pm and by appointment

Related images
  1. Marcela Paniak, Elyseum serie, 2013, photographie ancienne numérisée, fleurs séchées, 60 x 40 cm, Courtesy the artist
  2. Gayle Chong Kwan, Bronze X, 2013, impressio uv sur dibond doré, contrecollé sur aluminium, 70 cm, Courtesy Galerie Alberta Pane
  3. Charbel-Joseph H. Boutros, "No Light in White Light, Night cartography", 2014, carbone et spray noir sur papier, 50 x 70. Courtesy the artist and Grey Noise, Dubaï