SAINT-LOUIS-LÈS-BITCHE.- The Fondation d’entreprise Hermès continues its programme of exhibitions at La Grande Place, Musée du Cristal Saint-Louis in Saint-Louis-lès-Bitche (Moselle) with a solo presentation by artist Dominique Ghesquière. The show is part of the Foundation’s worldwide programme of events at its contemporary art spaces in Brussels, Singapore, Seoul and Tokyo, and in association with leading French art institutions (“Simple Shapes” at the Centre Pompidou-Metz and “L’esprit du Bauhaus” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris).

The Foundation stages two exhibitions per year at La Grande Place, devoted to new work in contemporary art with a focus on artisan expertise. Each event is part of a themed series of three consecutive exhibitions devised in collaboration with cultural institutions from the Lorraine region, with the support of the Cristallerie Saint-Louis.

Following the first and second series, curated respectively by the Centre Pompidou-Metz and 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine (the Lorraine regional fund for contemporary art, based in Metz), the Foundation has commissioned the Centre for Contemporary Art – La Synagogue de Delme, in the French department of Moselle, to curate the third series of exhibitions.

Under the title “L’héritage des secrets” (“Legacy of secrets”), the Synagogue de Delme presents a series of three solo exhibitions engaging with the historical and architectural heritage of the Saint-Louis crystal foundry, and the workshop’s human, aesthetic and technical history over four centuries. The invited artists – French duo Hippolyte Hentgen, Thu-Van Tran and Dominique Ghesquière – immerse themselves in this unique world and create works that resonate with it and diffract its meaning, like light through crystal.

Dominique Ghesquière takes us back to the origins of the raw materials of crystal. Extending the museum’s visitor itinerary, with its displays of crystal objects, she presents ferns, forests, water and fire, as if sprung from the memory of the crystal itself, as reminders of their vital presence.

Curated by: CAC – La Synagogue de Delme

Dominique Ghesquière’s work is born of encounters between contrasting elements, drawn from nature, domestic interiors or the street. Often taking the form of sculptures or environments, they transpose everyday reality into the exhibition space to create unexpected interactions and perceptions, and incongruous set pieces that invite viewers to revisit acquired assumptions and knowledge, and to question the essential nature of things. While not strictly trompe l’œil, Ghesquière’s work occupies an ambivalent zone between truth and falsehood; and while the French situationist Guy Debord held that “in a world that has truly been turned on its head, truth itself is a culmination of falsehood”, Dominique Ghesquière favours a poetic vision of reality, beyond such restrictive dualities.

For her exhibition at La Grande Place, Musée du Cristal Saint-Louis, Ghesquière takes us back to the origins of the raw materials of crystal itself, and their transformation in its production process. Leading on from the museum’s visitor itinerary, with its displays of crystal objects, the artist reveals the presence of ferns (whose ashes are a key component of potash), forests, water and fire — as if sprung from the memory of the crystal itself, as reminders of their vital presence.

At La Grande Place, Ghesquière’s raw materials do not occupy the same space as the visitor, the museum floor. Rather, like the crystal wares whose origins they symbolise, they are installed for viewing behind vitrines reminiscent of a vivarium. Eschewing her works’ habitual more tactile, haptic appeal, this unprecedented arrangement invites us to shift our gaze serially from one sculpture to the next, the better to apprehend the natural forces that underpin each stage of the ongoing crystal-making process in the workshop adjoining the museum. Recalling the words of the 18th-century French chemist, philosopher and economist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, “nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”, and inspired directly by land art, Ghesquière’s interventions both remind and reveal to us the true, material and territorial “nature” of crystal in a work of delicate archaeology, poetically ringed with light.