The Dark Object of the Brightest Desires
The Keramis Museum, La Louvière, Belgium presents The Dark Object of the Brightest Desires, a duo-exhibition by Nicolas Delprat and Rachel Labastie on view through March 2, 2025.
The Keramis Museum offered Nicolas Delprat and Rachel Labastie carte blanche to create an exhibition this fall. The two artists, he a painter and she a ceramicist and sculptor, have lived and worked together in Brussels since 2011. This exhibition marks their sixth joint presentation in Europe. The Dark Object of the Brightest Desires is a comprehensive exhibition includes a range of work including sculptures, paintings and installations that reflect their individual talents but also the intuitive connection that they share together in life and art. One piece that evokes this partnership is Labastie’s sculpture, Des forces, DFMN 5, in which two hands made of two types of stone, gray and black, the hands are modelled from Labastie’s parents, are intertwined in a handshake that feels tight and solid as much as it seems they are slipping apart. Suspended by a series of blue straps that keeps them afloat in the air, there is something telling about the fragility of human connection which can be altered by outside forces. The exhibition evokes a feeling of the passage of time, of the ephemerality of life. Labastie’s ceramic sculptures of knotted and barren tree trunks dialogue with dark and atmospheric paintings by Delprat. Nature, humankind, the mystery of life feels embedded in their work. As art critic Anne Kerner writes: “Witnesses of their time, Rachel Labastie and Nicolas Delprat understand the power of death and the thirst for life. Through their works, so dark yet so radiant, they remind us—more intensely, together—that we will never be the last.” About their collaboration for The Dark Object of the Brightest Desires, Labastie notes that, “we selected and arranged the works to create a dialogue not only between our creations but also with the architectural space. The common themes are space and memory.”
Rachel Labastie was born in Bayonne in 1978. Her sculptures and installations are dominated by the presence of earth, either baked or raw. Her work, according to Marie-Laure Bernadac, exists in “a transitional state of transformation, of metamorphosis, which allows us to see and feel beyond the appearance of things.” Nicolas Delprat was born in Rennes in 1972. His work explores the value of light in painting and its dual role as subject and object in art history since the invention of photography, extending to contemporary art’s “light objects,” such as Dan Flavin’s installations and James Turrell’s environments.
The Dark Object of the Brightest Desires is on view at the Keramis Museum, La Louvière through March 2, 2025.
Upcoming exhibitions for the two artists in 2025 include:
Nicolas Delprat
April 30 to August 18, 2025: “In the Blur. Another Vision of Art, from Monet to Richter”, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, France.
Rachel Labastie
November 16, 2024, to March 23, 2025: The Economy of Desire, FRAC Auvergne, France.
May 5 to June 30, 2025: Rachel Labastie at Le Transfo Art Center, Paris, France (Curator: Marc Donnadieu).
June 15 to September 5, 2025: “Care and Healing”, Vaska Emanuilova Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria (Curator: Galina Dimitrova).
May to September 2025: Women Engaged, Villa Datris Foundation, France.
September 4 to October 26, 2025: Rachel Labastie in the Greenhouses of “Le Botanique,” Brussels, Belgium.
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