This exhibition invites us to a poetical wandering between apparently distant art practises. These however, create a beam of possible reveries, similar to a visit to an archaeological site by a passing traveller. By analogy, at the centre of our romantic attachment to the art object, fragments and splinters have been gathered. Their links to a broader universal formal history are unquestionable. These clues are proposed to restore what might have been, or still is, a way to define the act of collecting, in the most historical sense. Depuis le temps (Since then) leaves us free to follow our desires and sees in our symbolical bond to specific objects a value that crosses civilizations. Yet this is not a collage of authorless objects. Quite the opposite, this seemingly loose exhibition is structured by the assembling of deliberate positions of artists who share our unquenchable desire to grasp the outlines of this continuum.

Thus, Meuser (*1947) in letting the movement emboss, deform and warp structures apparently devoid of qualities, seems never to doubt of his capacity to reconnect with the artist’s fundamental status. It is no longer question of painting or sculpture but of surfaces transformed by will, time maybe, history certainly. The artist regains the right to pretend being the holder of elegance which in one look separates the banal from its uses contingences.

Uwe Henneken (*1974) seems to know the points shared by the great alchemical narratives, shamanic formulae and tales. He fixes imagination’s drifts and the patterns of dreams. His works aim at recovering the creative flow that roams in our netherworld, and to guide us through it.

Günter Förg (*1952–2013), with delicacy and precision, has taken over geometry to seize the real in its fluid and colourful forms. The surface of his small bronze sculptures look as if they wanted to generate figures as naturally as the colours overlap in minute transparencies in his two-dimensional works. The artist revives in us long-forgotten shapes and textures.

Similarly, does Laura Owen (*1970) return at the very sources of our vocabulary to bring these little horses. She reminds us that collections have been invented by artists. They, the first, empowered us to appropriate, in our own time, elements of earlier times hoping they might find an echo in coming eras. Since then, alas, artists seem to be the only ones capable to thin the encyclopaedia of forms that the great stories had frozen.

Samuel Gross