Figura

This exhibition proposes different ways of approaching the notion of the figure through the work of fourteen artists selected more for their “elective affinities” than for the sake of exhaustiveness.

The aim is to show how these artists reveal form at work in their practice through the visibility of the figure.

Everyday language often confuses form and figure. Yet form, in its primary sense, is a constitutive principle, whereas the figure is like its fruit, its legibility. At the origin of the form–figure correlation lies the pair substantial form–prime matter, developed by Aristotle and taken up by Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics in the Middle Ages. According to this doctrine, form is act, while matter is pure potentiality, pure becoming. The figure is born from the intimate union of substantial form and matter.

What interests us here is that, in the realm of making, this form–matter pair oscillates between the intellectuality of the concept and the concreteness of sensible matter. This pendular movement, depending on the relationship between the two, has generated an infinite variety of figures since the very beginning. The artist seeks the right rhythm between the intellect and the matter he or she informs.

This distinction between form and figure constitutes the core of the exhibition and reveals the diversity of expressions it can assume.

At a time marked by the perceived bankruptcy of the avant-gardes and of modernity, it seemed meaningful to cast a retrospective glance toward older sources, toward invariants of Greco-Latin civilization, toward other artistic constellations.

Less as an act of allegiance to the ancients than as an acknowledgment of a sidestep that liberates.

Dominique Rappez



A conference–debate on the concept of the Figure will take place on March 28 at 3:00 PM at Garage Cosmos.

Speaker: Dirk Dehouck, visual artist and philosopher. Professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels. Editorial director and member of the editorial board of the journal La Part de l’Œil since 2017. Founder of the Observatory of Practices in the Teaching of Mediation in the Visual Arts and editor of the journal Art, enseignement et médiation (2014–2020).


List of artists:
Art & Language
Jean-Pierre Bertrand
Sabine Blanc
Dialogist-Kantor
Aurélie Gravelat
Raymond Hains
Isidore Isou
Joseph Kosuth
Antoine Laval
Dominique Rappez
Marc Rossignol
Eugène Savitzkaya
Francis Schmetz
Bernard Villers