Raphaël Lecoquierre: Tills

From May 5 to September 10, 2023, Casino Luxembourg presents Tills, an exhibition by Raphaël Lecoquierre. 

Tills is Raphaël Lecoquierre’s (born 1988; lives and works in Brussels) first solo exhibition. It brings together a collection of recent works from the Nūbēs series (“clouds” in Latin) which began in 2010. The works in this corpus are created using a process that makes use of a vast set of vernacular analogue photographs. These images of families, landscapes or other memory instruments, gleaned and accumulated over time, are dissolved by oxidation in order to extract their coloured substance. The collected inks are incorporated into Venetian stucco and used a fresco as a pictorial material. The images documenting the world therefore disappear and are renewed on the surface of compositions with a nebulous and marbled appearance, like blocks of memories with blurry, undefined contours. The white hue of the Venetian stucco gives the works a cloudy appearance reminiscent of the Renaissance sfumato technique or nineteenth-century landscape paintings. The clouds here are summoned as romantic symbols, but they also mark the ephemeral character of life and the instability of the human condition. They equally refer to ‘clouds’, remote computer servers for saving and storing data. Raphaël Lecoquierre uses the photographic image as a marker of temporality, a representation of something that existed, which he undermines and subverts in order to provoke the emergence of an autonomous and timeless form of poetry.

The calcareous, rocky matter of the stucco that makes up the works in the exhibition is at the origin of the title Tills, a geological term designating the debris of sedimentary rocks which are dragged and then abandoned by glaciers as they pass. The glacier here is used as a metaphorical representation of passing time, whose traces, left by its slow and imperceptible movement, are materialised by the paintings and sculptures in the exhibition. Their forms refer to the architecture of ancient civilizations, such as the pyramid or the Gothic warhead, which may have a transcendental character, but also to the field of the more recent, trivial construction industry, like the cylinder, the board or a wall covering reminiscent of American minimalism. 

Within the Tills exhibition, a site-specific installation is displayed as a fresco on the walls and floor of Casino Luxembourg. It is accompanied by an original sound piece entitled Still, developed by the sound artist Lou Drago. Still is part of an ongoing series called Suspending Time and takes the form of a continuous drone whose sound seems repetitive, even static. Nevertheless, it evolves very slowly over the course of the exhibition, reminiscent of glaciers that move almost imperceptibly. According to the American philosopher Susanne K. Langer, “time exists for us because we experience tensions and their resolutions.” Thus, visitors are invited to lie down to try to experience non vertical time in music or, as Drago describes it, a suspension of time. This alternative mode of listening is akin to many meditation and mindfulness practices, which emphasise the importance of focusing on the present. Meditation makes it possible to become aware of thought, with the imperative of continually returning to an anchorage – often breathing and, in this case, sound. This work hypotheses an interdependence between meditation and non-linear listening: certainly, the experience of vertical time can have a meditative effect, but conversely, it is necessary to be in a state of meditation, that is, to be freed from conscious thought, in order to experience time vertically. 

To mark the experience of time, the works in Tills will imperceptibly evolve and change their appearance throughout the duration of the exhibition. The reaction of the carbonation of the stucco transforming the lime into limestone will slightly reduce the intensity of the colour of the works over a period of months. Simultaneously, Lou Drago’s sound piece will fade slightly and very gradually until the end of the exhibition. 

Curators: Kevin Muhlen & Stilbé Schroeder.

As a part of: European Month of Photography.