Specific Subject
Edith Dekyndt’s project for the Fondation CAB, immerses us in an artist’s universe in which links are uncovered between new and evolving technologies, ancestral knowledge and contemporary issues. Certain works confront the decomposition of matter, conveying at once a sense of both brutality and fragility, thus interrogating the problem of the simultaneous coexistence of these two antagonistic notions.
With a view to sustainability, this project places particular importance on the use of materials that respect the environment and human labor and relies primarily and, wherever possible, on materials that are either found in the local area – Antibes beach, flea market, around the Fondation – or manufactured in the studio.
At the very heart of the exhibition, subtly demarcating the space between inside and outside, is a monumental curtain tinted with wine marc, the result of a close collaboration with a local vineyard. This imposing curtain, hung in front of the large window, instantly catches the eye and invites deep contemplation. Continuing the visit, we see works that integrate fabrics and ceramics in flexible forms that are grafted almost fluidly onto the existing architecture and establish a formal and intimate dialogue with the space. These found textiles become silent witnesses to an earlier history, revealing both their own fragility and their capacity to reinvent themselves in a new environment. Like a video game suffering from glitches when its elements don’t load properly or when its characters find themselves trapped, the ceramics, developed by Unfold Studio in Antwerp and intentionally subjected to ‘glitches’ during their printing in clay, create folds reminiscent of fabrics. There are also pieces of wood from a nearby beach, sticks that, though fragile, evoke the possibility of walking. Reworked with care and delicacy, these modest materials are transformed into meaningful objects.
A key characteristic of Edith Dekyndt’s artistic practice is the combination of an understated idiom and intensely evocative materiality. By merging conceptual, scientific and experimental approaches, the artist deconstructs the signs of her creative process. She archives, collects and catalogs images, sounds and objects using a rigorous methodology, manifesting an emblematic reality through her work.
Exploring the spaces of knowledge formation and the limits of its compartmentalization, her practice adopts a critical and speculative perspective, establishing the necessary conditions to bear witness to a social and political reality. Revealing an attraction to the elusive and the intangible, her work draws on signs of impermanence, while evoking the imprint left by history on the surface of things, architecture and public spaces. This approach underlines the urgent need to question the way that historical narratives are written.
In the current context, marked by conflicts and radical transformations in our ways of living and acting, with economic, material, immaterial and emotional repercussions, the artist offers a series of works in which the dynamics between nature and culture, the rural and the urban, generate new paradigms that must be faced.
The title of the exhibition, Specific Subjects, is a reference to Donald Judd’s influential manifesto, « Specific Objects », published in 1964. Although her artistic practice, developed since the 1990s, is characterized by formal understatement and an emphatic materiality, Dekyndt deliberately moves away from a more hermetic minimalism, interrogating and evoking « subjects » rather than « objects ». With this in mind, three works from the CAB collection and the Fondation Walter et Nicole Leblanc were included in the exhibition. Selected by the artist herself, the works, Untitled, 1965 by Donald Judd; Untitled, 1987 by Meuser and Gouache – Relief sable, 1960 by Walter Leblanc, open the way to a potential or future dialogue with her own oeuvre and in turn reflect the interest and commitment to minimal art that characterizes the collection and program of the CAB Foundation.
The exhibition in Saint Paul de Vence is both a journey through Édith Dekyndt’s artistic universe, where the dialogue between nature and culture intertwines with the territory, and an experience that transcends the usual spaces of art. As viewers, she invites us to explore multiple levels of meaning and to question our understanding of space, memory and temporality.
This exhibition reflects a hybrid approach to the creative process, which involves observation, research, collection and analysis of elements; a spatial exploration between territories where dividing lines and fluctuations lead us to construct imaginary spaces as a means of resistance and resilience. As Isabelle Stengers rightly asserts, it is time to build an environment that anticipates, enables and encourages shared experience and complicity.
María Inés Rodríguez
Curator: María Inés Rodríguez
Photo credit: Antoine Lippens, Hannah Pallot, Pierre Daras, Pierre Henri Leman
Soundscape: Nicolas Verhaeghe
