Déjà vu

One sometimes has the impression of having already experienced a situation, been in a place, or seen an image. This sensation is brief, strange and often impossible to explain. We know it is not an actual memory, yet the feeling persists.

This exhibition is based on this familiar experience of déjà vu.

The works presented do not tell any new stories. On the contrary, they replay, repeat and reshape forms, images and movements which we feel we recognise. Some of them seem to belong to another time. Others resemble images from films, paintings or collective memory. However, when we take a closer look, there is always something that is not quite right.

Here, déjà vu is not a mistake.
It is a way of looking.

Artists work with what we already have in our minds: known images, recognisable styles, inherited forms. But they move them about, slow them down, retell them or subtly alter them.
This discrepancy creates unease. The spectator recognises something, then has doubts. He thinks he knows, but then hesitates.

The video by Oliver Beer, placed at the centre of the exhibition, shows us this process in a very simple way. An image from a well-known cartoon seems to be reborn before our eyes, sketch after sketch. We recognise it even before we can put a name to it. A memory forms along with the image.

Around this work are paintings, drawings, photographs and other videos which amplify this experience. Some use images from art history, others play on the repetition of a single motif. Yet others evoke hazy memories, mental images, impressions we have felt before.

Visitors are invited to take their time as they walk around the exhibition. To accept that they will not understand immediately. To observe how an image becomes first familiar, and then strange.

Déjà vu is not an exhibition about the past.
It is an exhibition about the way we see nowadays, in a world saturated with images, copies, references and recurrences.

Perhaps what we see is never totally new.
But what we feel, that can be.