For toi et nous, her fourth solo exhibition in the gallery, Thu Van Tran (°1979) reveals works realised during the lockdown.This unprecedented situation, experienced by every one of us, brought the artist to conceive an exhibition that abords fragility, melancholy, inaccessible nature.

Notions of trace, transparency, memory and erasure are constant in the work of the artist. Be it in her drawings or works made with pigment and rubber, we can find again these ideas of covering, of muddled effects.

The works also allude to the window and the world that we can see without being able to access it.There is a beautiful paradox in seeing from the inside a space that opens up to the outside. In different places, the terra cotta works and those in porcelain testify of the fragility of things and the fragmentation of memories. The shrouds that are presented on the floor in the rear space are terra cotta works realised from imprints of frames and the back of canvasses. How can you show what’s at the back of things, the invisible?

In a beautiful text that starts with a quotation of Thu Van, Pedro Morais speaks about memory, its reorganisation and its properties: "Memory is our medium and we live within its fabric’, says Thu Van Tran, affirming the constructed character of memory, which is always incomplete, prone to manipulation, but also capable of expanding to encompass points of view that have long been excluded, and is thus modifiable and impermanent. But it is undoubtedly the latter part of her affirmation that emerges here as her signature: while her work integrates narrative, story, critical analysis of history, and her own personal background, it is through materials that Thu Van Tran constructs her thought."

This exhibition treats matter: rubber, earth, pigments, graphite are materials she uses for their plasticity but also for their historical and memorial load.

« In certain historical events, I’m searching for the shape of a possible rereading by way of an aesthetic experience. This experience requires a prior transformation, an affective translation, both sensory and formal, within which creation can take place, a space for the imagination. Rubber is as much a point of reference in history as it is a material: primitive, earthly, unchanging, white, pure, alive from the outset. The atmosphere in these rubber plantations is quite particular, full of poetry and humidity, where thoughts react with the body and senses, and from where you emerge quite altered. »

Thu Van Tran