Elle est retrouvée. What? – Eternity: The AMBASSADE, 1001 Al Wasl Road, Al Manara, Dubai

Elle est retrouvée.
Quoi ? – L’Éternité.
C’est la mer allée
Avec le soleil.

It is found again.
What? – Eternity.
It is the sea fled away
With the sun.

Arthur Rimbaud, "L'Éternité", 1872

Some poems fit in a pocket and last a lifetime. This one was written by a seventeen-year-old in May 1872. Four lines, and a wild idea: eternity is not somewhere else. It is here, before our eyes, at the precise moment when sea and sun meet on the horizon. It is not to be discovered. It is to be found again.

To find again: perhaps the most urgent idea of our time. We live at full speed. Images scroll past, desires follow one another, everything passes and nothing stops. We look at everything, and we see almost nothing.

Elle est retrouvée brings together three artists who choose to slow down. Three techniques, one kind of attention. They look long at what we only see passing by. A reflection, a wave, a flower: they catch hold of them, and give them time to last.

Step inside. Facing Thomas Devaux's Totems, the first thing you see is yourself. The dichroic glass returns your reflection before revealing the image beneath: a product's packaging, as found on a supermarket shelf, enlarged until it becomes pure radiance of blue and gold. The consumer object, the one we buy and throw away, rises here as a column of light. Take a step: the colour shifts. In Devaux's work, the sun is in the glass.

Further on, water. Guillaume Grando's surfaces look like photographs of water in motion, yet nothing here is caught in the moment. Coming from graffiti, and a surfer himself, Grando builds each wave line by line with an airbrush, then sets it in resin, sands it, works it again. Hours of work for a single second of ocean. And yet, as you move, light slides across the resin, and the sea begins to move again.

Then, silence. Majda Abdulshakour's large canvases, often taller than we are, are made of flowers, yet we do not look at a bouquet: we step into a field. In Before the Storm, white daisies float in a bluish grey. The paint is thick, the gesture broad, and everything seems suspended, just before the sky turns. A flower lives a few days; on her canvases, it no longer fades. The artist describes each canvas as a self-portrait. One understands why: it is not the flower she paints, but what she keeps of it.

How do you hold on to what passes? Each answers with a material. The answers differ, yet they meet in a single idea: the instant does not stop; it settles.

In the same poem, Rimbaud calls on us to break free from "des humains suffrages, des communs élans": from the verdicts of the crowd and its shared impulses, from noise, from speed, from what everyone wants. This is what the exhibition offers: a few minutes outside of time.

In Dubai, every evening, the sea goes off with the sun. What if eternity were not what lasts forever, but what we take the time to see?

Viktoriya Melny
Curator

Venue: The Ambassade, 1001 Al Wasl Road, Al Manara, Dubai

Opening reception on Tuesday 10 November