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

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 see everything, and we truly look at 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. Then, beneath your reflection, an image surfaces. Devaux photographs consumer products, the ones lined up on our supermarket shelves, and blurs them until they can no longer be recognised: all that remains of the packaging is pure radiance of blue and gold. Yet everything that attracts us is still there: the shimmer of dichroic glass, which lets light through and sends it back at once, the gold-leaf frame, the colour shifting with every step. Devaux borrows the codes of commercial seduction, but takes away the object. What remains is desire, laid bare. How many hours do we spend in those aisles, drawn to whatever shines? The moment when everything stops does not only come at the edge of the sea: it can arise in front of a shop window. Without even knowing it, you have already begun to look.

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, a surfer settled on the Atlantic coast, 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. His wave does not imitate water: it holds on to its rhythm, the very one the wind draws on the sand of the dunes. As with Soulages, whose outrenoir left its mark on him, the light comes not from the image but from the surface itself: as you move, it 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. She does not paint from life, but from what she calls her world of imagination, and 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 pass; 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 find again when we take the time to look?

Viktoriya Melny
Curator

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

Opening reception on Tuesday 10 November