What Remains#2

Group exhibition, Kadoc Chapel, Leuven Belgium – September 2024

WHAT REMAINS by Leonardo Regano.

‘What Remains’, is a group exhibition that investigates the ways of perceiving images through the visual arts.   In Kadoc’s spaces, here in Leuven, a dialogue has been created between nine artists, five of Belgian nationality and four Italians, in whose research the need to investigate the relationships that exist in our vision emerges as a constant element.

The initial premise is that we are immersed in a visually complex reality where multiple, sometimes contrasting elements constantly converge. For example, an environment where architecture and landscape, references to the present and the past, anthropic elements and nature coexist and overlap. There is no single way to confront this continuous perceptual stimulation because, as John Berger states, ‘the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.’ Seeing, therefore, is defined as an arbitrary and subjective act based on the individual’s ability to grasp the references to the complexity of the data in which we are immersed. ‘We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.’ 

This is the theoretical argument from which subsequent reflections start, as the British art critic investigates visual approaches to art. It is evident here that visual arts have always been based on images created by an arbitrary selection of reality, a choice made by the artist – from Greek mimesis to Roland Barthes’ punctum, considered the foundation of photographic technique – which presents to the observer a kind of aenigma, which they may choose to interpret based on their own knowledges.

Returning to our context of investigation, in ‘What Remains’, a reflection on an image grafted onto the relationship between present and past seems predominant. This relationship was dominant in the first episode of ‘What Remains’, curated by me in the summer of 2022 in the former Church of San Mattia, in Bologna, presenting Patrick Ceyssens and Giovanna Caimmi duo-show.

This aspect is also predominant in the new research group. The reason for this predominance can be attributed to the European context in which we find ourselves, offering a prompt to question the meaning we attribute to the past today. ‘The past is a foreign country whose features are shaped by today’s predilections, its strangeness domesticated by our own preservation of its vestiges’, wrote David Lowenthal, highlighting how the way we perceive and interpret the past is shaped by contemporary needs and visions as well as by the context in which we find ourselves.] Our European matrix is inextricably connected to the concept of ruins as defined by Diderot in the mid-eighteenth century, which over time continues to draw the interest of artists and critics. However, this fact remains entirely partial. The trace of what remains is grafted into our present through the interpretation we attribute to it. For this reason, what remains is a fragile, transitory, and non-unique concept that relates to both the individual and the collective, evolving and defining itself in relation to them. Nostalgia and collective memory play key roles in determining what is preserved and how. The preservation of cultural heritage is not just an act of historical preservation but also a way of constructing and affirming modern identities from the past. Decisions on what to preserve reflect current priorities and often reinterpret the past to adapt it to the present. This dialogue gains additional strength in the place hosting this second version of What Remains, again a former church under restoration now consecrated to the arts and research.