HORIZON

Halle Nord, Geneva, 2009

HORIZON was presented at Halle Nord, Geneva, in 2009.

The installation brought together a series of large black works in which dense, repetitive marks cover almost the entire surface. Across this accumulation, a darker horizontal interruption appears — sometimes continuous, sometimes irregular — suggesting the distant contour of a landscape.

The horizon is reduced to an elementary division: above and below, distance and surface, light and darkness.

Yet these works do not attempt to represent a particular landscape. Seen from a distance, they may evoke mountains, water, sky or an indistinct territory. Seen more closely, this illusion begins to dissolve. What appeared to be landscape returns to the material reality of the work: repeated marks, traces, density and the physical surface.

The scale of the works is important. Installed across the architecture of Halle Nord, the horizon no longer remains contained within a single image. It passes from one work to another and begins to establish a relationship with the walls, the height of the room and the position of the viewer.

The exhibition therefore operates between two experiences. From afar, the eye searches for landscape and depth; from close by, it encounters surface, material and repetition.

The triptychs reinforce this tension. Their divisions interrupt the image while simultaneously allowing the horizon to continue mentally across the gaps. What is physically separated remains perceptually connected.

In HORIZON, landscape is therefore less a subject than a threshold. The horizontal line becomes the minimum condition from which a landscape can emerge — a boundary between the material surface of the work and the image constructed by the eye.

The horizon is not drawn simply to describe a place; it is the point at which an abstract surface begins to become a landscape.