NIGHT STROLL​
Kaï-Chun Chang, Zhi Ding, Nicolas Gaume,
Travis MacDonald, Ellen Siebers, Flora Temnouche

Then the night takes another step.

Earlier, all listened;
Now no sound dares to bloom;

everything flees, hides and is silent.

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From "La nuit", Victor Hugo, Toute la Lyre, 1888 and 1893

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Galleries Elsa Meunier and Mathilde Le Coz are delighted to present "Night Stroll", a group show bringing together three French artists (Kaï-Chun Chang, Nicolas Gaume and Flora Temnouche) and three artists from the international scene (Zhi Ding and Ellen Siebers work in America, Travis MacDonald in Australia).

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«Night Stroll» takes us on a nocturnal walk through paintings that evoke the poetic diversity of night: a place of reverie, solitude, wandering, magic, intimacy, creation... The six artists offer us a dreamlike, dynamic vision of this moment that leaves time suspended, this moment for oneself filled with mystery which reveals light.

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A painter of light, Kaï-Chun Chang makes the silence of his luminous star resonate as it fades into a dull, aspiring nothingness. The suffocating darkness is pierced by a tenuous but sure glow. The lunar landscape of Arc 7 (2023) imposes an absorbed contemplation of the immense dark expanse - the painting sweeps us into a mute, elevated cosmogonic reverie. A similar phenomenon occurs in Nicolas Gaume’s work. The moon, shrouded in stirring clouds, reveals an endless desolate plain. The star, so small on the canvas, makes the immensity vibrate in shades of browns and grey-blues. The viewer walks alone across the vast, undulating expanse, his or her lantern clinging to the sky.

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Travis MacDonald takes us with his characters through a colourful urban night, lit up by the city’s artificial lights. The hum of the drowsy but lively megalopolis is not far away: his night, alternative, is inhabited, lived, shared. Zhi Ding, too, tells us the story of a night. A figure with a blurred silhouette emerges from a powdery darkness. Her night, with no witnesses or landmarks, thickens the action and dramatises the scene. For painter Flora Temnouche, night is a journey, a horizon that we leave behind in the hope of tomorrow. In Lightness of being (2024), the moon, a distant accomplice, eclipses a solitary and chilly departure.

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It is in the depths of night that days are created. It shelters this introspective moment of self- reflection. Ellen Siebers proposes an inverted reference to the painting by Velàzquez conserved in the National Gallery of London, where the focus is on the reflection rather than the model. Darkness envelops the scene, revealing only the glint of Venus in the mirror: a way of highlighting an inner gaze, a vision of the self, but also of giving us access, of making us witnesses to this intimate moment of reflection - perhaps metaphorically that of creation.

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