Curatorial statement

by Diane Drubay

To leave is to allow quiet to follow. But not necessarily the silence of an ending; it can also be the moment of a new beginning.

After Light, The Bloom unfolds from that quiet. Presented in a once-vacant building in central London, the exhibition takes negative spaces as its starting point, as potential, as opportunity. Emptiness is no longer an absence, but rather a necessary ingredient for turning ecological, architectural and emotional ground fertile.

A shared horizon binds the 8 exhibited artworks together. Transitional moments in time are explored, unfolded in landscape format, like slow-moving paintings or a window opening up on new perspectives. Sky, sun, and distant land set the stage in a moment that refuses closure, at dusk, at dawn, elsewhere. This in-between time, also called the liminal, is a place where endings and beginnings can happen. They echo a longer lineage of painters who used the horizon line as a mental construct of a real but nonexistent landscape, placing all these artworks into another realm, suspended in time.

Louis-Paul Caron's practice places exposure at the heart of solastalgia, the full awareness of ongoing environmental changes linked to paralyzing distress. In La Colline, two women sit quietly within a rural landscape, one with eyes closed, the other facing a horizon where monoculture fields meet wild woodland. Wind moves imperceptibly through their clothing and the grasses. A scene from a movie, a moment of shared solitude captured by AI, a painting where the material moves. It feels as if the image is breathing. La Colline is not about disappearance, but about attention: what we still see, what still grows. In La Piscine, Louis-Paul Caron takes us to a much more human landscape, on the edge of an abandoned swimming pool. Memories of lost summers, the landscape cracks before our eyes and life resumes its place. Here, space is given back to the one who had been controlled. Rewilding in action.

Inviting us to contemplation and serenity, Kelly Richardson's Journey to the After is nevertheless rooted in political considerations. A panoramic three-channel video installation shows tear gas canisters drifting on a still body of water, remnants of the Fairy Creek protests, the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Here, on this mesmerising body of water, butterflies quickly settle on the metal remnants, then fly away again, as symbols of fragility, resistance, and transformation. Destruction and repair are staged as one story. The reflection of the water invites us to remember the causes of ecological violence (war, pollution, extraction, mass extinction) while admiring the beauty that persists.

Despite appearances, the universe presented by Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes is just as disruptive. In her Tele Garden series, artificial gardens that echo the codes of tropical tourist parks present a synthetic nature. Neon-pink plastic leaves, 3D-modeled flower blossoms, and gradient skies are displaced from any kind of natural environment to become part of a televised spectacle. In Post-Mortal, Bianca Shonee Arroyo-Kreimes explores the topic of death and birth, and the suspended moments in between, in the digital realm. A moth flies through a simulated universe while a mantis starts to hunt it, leading them into a glitchy portal, symbol of the end or a new beginning.

The butterfly, which appears in several works and throughout the exhibition space, is the guide to this exhibition. Symbolizing metamorphosis, migration, and impermanence, it embodies the fragility of ecosystems and the possibility of change, moving across thresholds.

Ben Arpea's artworks call for another type of negative space, where memories are attached to moments of light and matter. In Still Water and The Awakening of Lavender, suns hang low over geometrically composed horizons. These works are saturated with Mediterranean light; Though no human figure appears, the images evoke sensory presence, you can almost smell the lavender, feel the air. Framed like paintings and rendered in slow-moving video, Arpea’s works explore the landscape not as something to dominate or romanticize, but as a vessel for perception and remembrance. Here, the horizon becomes a soft line between then and now, the real and the remembered.

Through the works in After Light, The Bloom and the scenography presented in the exhibition space at BLEUR Gallery, time stands still, and space melts between reality and impressions, presence and absence.