Group Show, L'Ambassade, Dubai: Elle est retrouvée Eternity, Found Again

Elle est retrouvée.
Quoi ? -  L'Éternité.
C'est la mer allée
Avec le soleil.

It is found again.
What? Eternity.
It is the sea, gone
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 in the flow. 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 slow that flow. Two French artists and a painter born in Jeddah, on the shores of the Red Sea: they do not come from the same place, do not work with the same materials, have not lived the same lives. Yet all three take hold of something fleeting, a reflection, a wave, a flower, and give it 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 colour overflows. Majda Abdulshakour's canvases, often wider than outstretched arms, do not show bouquets: they draw us into a field. Thick paint, sweeping gestures, saturated reds, yellows and pinks. A flower lives a few days; in her work, it no longer fades. Majda describes each canvas as a self-portrait. One understands why: it is not the flower she paints, but what she keeps of it.

Glass, resin, paint. Sun, sea, flower. Three artists, one gesture: to stop time without freezing it. Their works do not fix the instant; they make it vibrate. They move with us.

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 the flow.

In Dubai, every evening, the sea goes off with the sun. Rimbaud wrote it: eternity is here. Still, one has to find it again.

Viktoriya Melny
Curator, CultureMe Art Advisory

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

Opening reception on Tuesday 10 November