LAMPPOSTS

Lampposts or light in the contemporary world 

The question of light, already present in Aristotle, the Neoplatonists or the Arab falsafa of the 12th and 13th centuries, finds a place in contemporary phenomenology, especially in art. What is light? Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag have tried to answer this question through the prism of photography. For his part, Henry Miller evoked the idea that the painter is the one who learns to see; the one who, in a certain way, goes beyond what is only visible. But Merleau-Ponty went even further, by giving to art the privileged place where the unveiling of the invisible will take place. The work of Emilie Bitauld invites us to study the relations and the differences between the city and the places stripped of all movement, of all light. By visiting lost but powerfully luminous places, and by animating the solitude of the depopulated street, we finally see what attracts the painter to seek the light beyond the darkness. 

Ileana Garza-Terán, curator