Drawing / Painting – DECOUVRIR RE DECOUVRIR

DÉCOUVRIR RE DÉCOUVRIR

Musée Rath, Genève, 2004

DÉCOUVRIR  RE DÉCOUVRIR belongs to a period when I was exploring Renaissance painting and questioning the way we look at images inherited from the history of art.

The work originates from a very small detail of a Renaissance painting, which I remember as a work by Titian. Rather than reproducing the painting as a whole, I isolated an almost imperceptible fragment and enlarged it more than a hundred times.

Through this radical change of scale, the detail loses its original function. Something that once belonged to the background of another image becomes an autonomous work. Forms begin to dissolve; the precision of the old master is transformed into grains, traces, movements of light and darkness. The sea and its waves remain perceptible, yet they hover somewhere between landscape and abstraction.

For me, this enlargement was more than a technical operation. It became an act of looking—of entering an image in order to discover what normally escapes our attention.

Installed as a long horizontal presence on the monumental white wall of the Musée Rath, with its central axis at approximately eye level, the work established a physical relationship with the viewer. From a distance, it could be perceived as a horizon or a landscape. As one approached, recognition became increasingly uncertain and the image revealed its material structure.

The title DÉCOUVRIR / REDÉCOUVRIR expresses precisely this movement: to discover something hidden within an existing image, and then to rediscover it through another scale, another space and another way of seeing.

More than twenty years later, in 2026, I reconstructed this installation from my remaining drawings, measurements and memories, with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI). The original photographic documentation had been lost. Through this reconstruction, an exhibition that had gradually become a memory could become visible again.

And unexpectedly, this act of reconstruction brought me back to the title itself: DÉCOUVRIR  RE  DÉCOUVRIR. To rediscover not only an image, but also a moment of my own work that time had almost erased.