“When Dominique De Beir pierces her cardboard boxes, she doesn’t totally ruin the notion of painting, but rather puts them in crisis. Indeed, what is a painting where there is nothing to see, where the gaze falls into sock traps? What a thing is,” writes Aristotle, “is always determined by its function: for a thing is truly itself when it can perform its function, an eye, for example, when it can see; on the contrary, the thing incapable of performing its function exists only by homonymy, for example a dead eye or an eye of stone, just as a saw of wood is no more a saw in painting. “These are not mere surfaces, like a painting, a fresco, a sheet of paper or a wooden panel; they are surfaces that criticize themselves as such, i.e. that are based on their own crisis. Indeed, they call for touch as much as life, to caress these holes which are often, at the same time, protuberances. As Dominique de Beir reads Braille, the tactile dimension of her works takes on a particular relief. It’s the whole body that takes over: the impotent eye gives way to the hand.”
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The exhibition is open to the public from November 26, 2008 to January 16, 2009.
