We could begin by saying that Eva Ayache-Vanderhorst’s proposal is an installation where metal and painting merge and absorb one another in a miscible blend, where the artist’s gesture allows the two techniques to interpenetrate and reciprocally intertwine. Constellations 2 imposes a spectral presence: the floating bodies of the paintings double and fragment within the large mirrors of the Café des Glaces, evoking a kind of panoptic and omniscient power. The central metallic sculpture, a penetrable zone positioned at the threshold between outside and inside, asserts itself as an ambiguous territory where everything remains to be thought through under the looming threat of hanging pendulums—though disarmed—within a relation to time held in suspension by the muffled force of gravity. Thus, the exhibition space asserts itself as a circulatory territory where the viewer is invited to observe frontally, but also to discover through the reverse and through reflection these presences with incised eyes, merging with the metal structure.
One must also mention the artist’s obsessive relationship with the painted subject, which recurs repeatedly throughout her work. The faces represented by Eva Ayache-Vanderhorst appear on the canvas and imprint themselves on pre-found textile fibers: bedsheets still bearing the traces of others, inhabited by irregularities that endow them with a kind of historicity. The artist conjures up genderless, identity-less faces and bodies—bodies whose traces cannot be positioned on any map nor in any sky, simply because they do not belong to anything locatable, except perhaps to the frontier itself, a third, liminal space: floating, unanchored, between what appears and what vanishes. Though these vaporous bodies inscribe themselves within a genealogy of forms developed by Eva Ayache-Vanderhorst, they seem extracted from History, as if removed from reality and from all forms of temporality, as if born “in the placeless place of their dreams.”1
An enigmatic space, intimate and yet permeable, Constellations 2 refers us to astral geographies and invites us to reflect on our connections, our correspondences, on the echoes that may reside in the thickness of our narratives, in the density of our pasts, and in the memory of our bodies, on the passing of time and its silences, as a way to think from the interstice, the threshold, beyond what confines us.
-Juliette Hage (Translated from French)
Eva Ayache Vanderhorst (*1994 in France)
She has lived and worked in Lausanne since 2022. She is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure d’art de Paris-Cergy and pursued a master’s degree in visual arts at ECAL in Switzerland. In 2023, she presented her installation The Constellations 1 in the group exhibition All my lovers like to fight at the Centre d’art de la Meute in Lausanne. Her photographic project Astana, entre rêve et réalités was exhibited at Galerie Floréal Bellevile and at the Rencontres de la photographies d’Arles.
