Between Mark and Matter

Before they become images, some forms behave as encounters.

These paintings do not hold through likeness, but through contact: a repeated strike, a tilted vessel, a fragment of architecture, a body half-emerging from pigment. Elements press into one another, carrying residues and dissonances that exceed their own contour.

Bringing together practices that work at the porous threshold of abstraction and figuration, Between Mark and Matter gathers artists Inès Di Folco Jemni, Fidelis Joseph and Ngimbi Bakambana Luve, for whom painting is animated by tonal vibrancy and shifts in legibility. Figures may pass into sign; objects take on the weight of their presence; a repeated mark functions as a chromatic interruption that shifts how surrounding forms are perceived. Across these works, forms gather without hierarchy: figure before ground, subject before object, symbol before meaning; producing images built from accumulation rather than arrangement.

Fidelis Joseph’s 3 Strikes is structured through the recurrence of three red bars that cut across each composition as gestures of forewarning, rupture and imposed boundary. Their repetition operates less as a fixed symbol than as a charged interruption that moves across the image. Surfaces carry the imprint of bodies in transit, shaped by conditions of civil unrest, economic precarity, and displacement, where figures appear in states of passage across unstable ground. The ambiguous strike both delimits and activates the visual field, marking a space where movement is registered, interrupted and held in tension.

That pressure shifts register in Ngimbi Bakambana Luve’s paintings, such as Social Archaeology, where interiors are constructed through placement rather than perspective. Shoes, masks and other quotidian furnishings are held in arrangements that shift between interior scene and psychic architecture. Set into relation without folding into a single scene, each object maintains its own weight. As he writes in an accompanying poem, Interior / Exterior: “a mask converses with a chair, / a statuette meets the gaze of a pair of worn shoes.” Encounters accumulate as a lived syntax.

Inès Di Folco Jemni’s work extends this field of relation into an ancestral and geographical register. In Jellaz, named after the cemetery in Tunis where her ancestors are buried, memory is anchored in a site where intimacy and history converge. Coastline and lineage occupy the same pictorial space, pulling horizon into and out of visibility. Forms surface and recede like sediment, carried forward through layers of association rather than composed clarity.

Across the exhibition, hue and contrast guide attention, bringing certain elements forward while pushing others into obscurity.

As Luve writes:

“It is to let objects speak through their silence,
and to let walls open into horizons.”

In these works, painting enacts precisely this opening: a space where forms perpetually meet.