Le prince des rayons
2 June - 15 July 2012
Galerie VidalCuglietta
Brussels, Belgium

Artists
Danai Anesiadou, Marianne Berenhaut, Edith Dekyndt, Peter Downsbrough, Amy Granat, Sven Johne, Runo Lagomarsino, Adriana Lara, Erwan Mahéo, Miks Mitrevics, Nick Oberthaler, Mira Sanders, Lisa Tan, Pieter Vermeersch


The exhibition “Le prince des rayons” (The Prince of the Rays) explores the resonance of the horizon and its aesthetic, poetic and utopian associations in the thinking and imagery of contemporary art. This article no claim to historical analysis, but it is worth noting that since the 19th century the ho- rizon has characterised and revealed Romantic subjectivity. It oversteps the frontiers of rational knowledge and is invested with feelings. As a structure of the landscape, it becomes a state of mind, the Stimmung referred to by Heidegger. Later, the invisible leads to emptiness, the abyss; the distant horizon floats to the surface, rises up and plunges us into nothingness. “The ego is thrown out of the window”* , and this defenestration allows the mys- tery of the horizon to come about. This is the great leap into the opaque matter of the horizon, of the kind performed by the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader in his final work, “In Search of the Miraculous” (1975).

But who is this “prince of the rays”? His name is so attractive and mysteri- ous that we have preferred not to reveal his identity yet. He is the central axis joining together all the other visual rays in Alberti’s Renaissance-period “Treatise on Painting”. He has become the poetic name substituting for the word horizon in the planning of this project, because, as lord of the gazing eye, he has the magnificence to make us “seers” beyond the limits of the image and perception.

Is it therefore because of its immanence and very inexorability that the horizon so stimulates the imagination? Is it because it retreats before us at each step we take? Is it the horizon’s metaphysical grandeur or a wariness of the temptation of the sublime which causes artists to preserve its repre- sentability? But who was it who asked whether the inaccessible was not the true goal of the quest?

Lilou Vidal, May 2012


* M. Richir, La Défenestration, L’ARD no. 46: Merleau-Ponty quoted by Céline Flécheux L’Horizon, des Traités de perspective au Land Art, PUR