Art Brussels

On the occasion of Art Brussels, the gallery brings together five artists — Sébastien J. Zanella, Franco Fontana, Miho Kajioka, Paul Cupido, and Éloïse Labarbe-Lafon — around a unifying thread: the photographic gesture. More than a simple technique, photography is presented here as an act, a movement, a breath — a way of inhabiting the world and revealing its presence. Each of the invited artists unfolds a singular interpretation, resonating with the others to compose a sensitive space shaped by echoes, silences, and correspondences. Sébastien J. Zanella embodies the gesture in its most instinctive and radical form. He photographs with a deliberately damaged camera, allowing light to penetrate and burn the film. The accident becomes a form of writing. His camera, a traveling companion and an extension of his gaze, enables him to explore memory, wandering, and trace. In his images, the human and the landscape merge in an organic light, infused with an almost flesh-like grain. Photography thus becomes a lived experience. Alongside him, Miho Kajioka and Paul Cupido explore the space of the interval. Inspired by Japanese thought, their works question the impermanence and fragility of moments. Their images do not describe — they suggest. They leave room for emptiness and silence — what Japanese aesthetics calls Ma: the space between things, the breath that connects, the absence that reveals presence. In Kajioka’s work, small formats become constellations, fragments of a fragmented narrative. In Cupido’s, the lightness of Japanese paper, the softness of the prints, and the suspension of forms create a photography that feels like breath and dream. Here, the photographic gesture becomes restrained, almost erased. Éloïse Labarbe-Lafon introduces a more tactile and artisanal dimension. Her photographic gesture is also painterly: she reworks her black-and-white prints by hand, recoloring them with oil paint. Her images — fragments of a revisited American dream — bear the trace of the hand, the gesture, the pigment. Her works become sensitive imprints, reminding us that photography is not only image, but also material, memory, and living surface. Finally, Franco Fontana, a pioneer of Italian photography, concludes the presentation with a series of unique collages created in the 1990s. In these works, he experiments with Polaroid transfers onto cardboard, enriched with collage and materials. Through this gesture, he blurs the boundary between photography, montage, and composition. Brought together within the booth, these five universes form a journey. The visitor moves from immediacy to breath, from raw energy to erasure, from shifting light to the softness of artisanal gesture. This parcours highlights the richness and diversity of contemporary photographic practices, and underscores how photography, beyond documentation, can become experience, space, and poetry.