Clément Grimm at Kissed Then Burned

After the lunar eclipse of September 7, 2025, the gallery sinks into an eternal golden hour — a day held in suspension, wavering between dusk and a postponed dawn. It recalls the technologies devised to tame light: dawn simulators, phototherapy lamps, red-light protocols. Each seeks to prolong daylight, adjust or regenerate the body, commodify the solar glow — and with it, the very perception of lived time. Here, light no longer follows its natural cycle; it conjures Andy Warhol’s unfinished Sunset (1967–72), where the sun’s slow descent became pure duration and spectral voice, filling the frame with a horizon that never quite vanishes.

Ecclesiastes 1:14 unfolds as a curtain falling from ceiling to floor, veiling the gallery’s glass façade. Outside, a stadium lamp casts raw heat, its light piercing the panes and the fabric to invade the space. The title recalls the verse: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.” The work operates as a protocol: the sun is replaced by a spotlight, eternity by studio mechanics. At each activation, the same stasis is replayed — a stage prepared, yet nothing begins. The viewer confronts a dispositif at once theatrical and withheld, as if revelation remained an endlessly deferred arrival.

Facing them, Palazzo Reloaded: three panels of white–grey–beige velvet absorb the glow like sunlit skin, struggling to reassemble fragments of a lost circadian rhythm. The surface retains fleeting marks — caress or scratch, traces of impulsive gestures. Fragile and reversible, they outline an unstable landscape, inserting an almost clandestine action into temporal pause. Upon this fabric, a handful of bronze-painted flies are fixed. They recall the mouches or beauty patches of the 17th and 18th centuries: small discs of velvet or taffeta placed on the skin to signal social rank or secret intentions, at once frivolous and strategic. Displaced onto the velvet, they slip from charm to inanity: lifeless, collapsed on a carpet suddenly raised, turning floor into wall.

The baroque fragility of flesh condenses here into a minor insect, enshrined and sanctified in metal. The work arrests the living and unravels the course of the present, haunted by revenants of the past.

The exhibition’s title, Video 50, refers to Robert Wilson’s television work (1978): fifty autonomous fragments without narrative, where even a curtain stirred before a window could become an entire stage. The exhibition follows this logic: not to narrate, but to hold and prolong. If Warhol stretched time into immobility, Wilson made it expectancy itself. Here, light, curtain, velvet, and mouches enact the same stillness. “The present is saturated by specters of the past, returning in altered forms, obstructing any true becoming.”