Emmanuel Régent, Pendentia Nubila [The Hanging Clouds]

Entitled Pendentia Nubila [The Hanging Clouds], Emmanuel Régent’s first exhibition at Dilecta, featuring a dozen unexhibited Indian ink drawings and watercolours on paper, is in fact marked by the notion of disruption.One the artist sometimes witnesses, when he depicts places or situations that bear the consequences of human hubris in its many forms — ancient relics as well as contemporary cities in ruins, shipwrecks, or plane crashes — and other times causes, when he sands down his paintings, dips his own drawings in a bath of black ink or tears up his watercolors, at the risk of losing them. For Emmanuel Régent’s work has as much to do with suspended time that it does with the suddenness of thunder or the violence of the fracture from Ovid’s verses. This structural ambiguity infuses his entire practice, both in his subjects and in the form he chooses to give them.

One of the series on show, the only spot of colour in the exhibition, depicts sunsets, in the tradition of painting from the motif, trying to convey an impression as faithfully as possible. But Emmanuel Régent follows this tradition without conforming fully to it: the best of each of these watercolours, painted daily, is systematically torn up, as much to impose a certain distance from the subject - a theme that has been over-figured in the history of art, between sublime’s embodiment and postcard cliché - as to remind us of the limits of representation and challenge its illusionist power. These sunsets are then given a form of abstraction once they are broken up, deprived of all the usual reference points for mimicry, so that they remain solely in colour. The fragments that result from this process are either scattered, the partial image becoming a work, independent of the initial whole from which it came; or they are joined together in such a way as to leave a visible trace of the tear, in the form of a white margin of varying size, like a lightning bolt or a scar.

Extract of the text about the exhibition, by Chris Marie Tyan