Eric Vernhes

Paul Virilio, philosopher and theorist of speed and of the technologies of perception, built his entire body of work around a striking image from his childhood: the horizon, that line towards which one runs without ever reaching it. Eric Vernhes, whose digital painting has always maintained a secret dialogue with Virilio’s thought, pays tribute to him in this exhibition by visually exploring the concepts that structured the philosopher’s work: the vanishing line, disappearance, speed as a transformation of the gaze.

The vanishing line is at once a notion of perspective — the point towards which parallel lines appear to converge — and a metaphor for escape, for the desire to leave, for the race towards the horizon. In Vernhes’s work, this double meaning translates into generative images in which spaces open and close, perspectives establish themselves and dissolve, and movement is always present but never completed. His works have the melancholy of late afternoons and the secret energy of what is just beginning. Sur la ligne de fuite is thus a posthumous dialogue between an artist and the philosopher who nourished him — a way of saying that certain intuitions travel through time and continue to enrich the present.

A whole life can be built on a sense of wonder or an intuition experienced as a child. Some memories must be ceaselessly “excavated” and explored in all their variations, because at the heart of these initial fascinations lie intuitions about a reality that is beyond us. Our role, for our whole life, then becomes to give form to these intuitions in order to reveal this hidden truth to ourselves and to others. Paul Virilio, who died last year and to whom this exhibition pays tribute, built his philosophical thought on a striking image from his childhood: that of the horizon and of the sea and air attacks off the coast of Nantes during the Second World War.