Projects Afterglow

At every moment of our lives, we are intertwined with all of humanity’s past, and that past is essentially language. We live against a background of incessant choir and, it is possible to imagine the presence of all that has ever been said and written as a single syllable crossing all ages. As W.S. Merwin puts it in his poem Utterance, “the echo of all that has already been said” surrounds us constantly, reality is encrypted with language.

 

The Afterglow exhibition is the culmination of long researches from which the artist assembled various symbols, imagery and texts from very distant times, using different mediums such as printing, engraving, drawing, video and mixed media. Like echoes, the works shows and highlight the links that exist between these isolated temporalities. As in his previous series Foundation and Atlas, Bertrand draws on various fields such as history, alchemy, literature, psychology and astrophysics. The projects of this exhibition stretch on the walls as a single voice, like a long sentence, in a time that is abolished.