Noémie Goudal
Inhale Exhale
May 2–31, 2025
Opening: May 2, 6–9pm

Click here to visit the exhibition’s private view.

Addressing the challenges inherent in her work, Noémie Goudal engages in a dizzying exercise: through the prism of paleoclimatology, how can we comprehend a world in motion – a reality that runs counter to contemporary conceptions of our planet as a fixed entity, with neatly defined continents and immutable borders?

For the artist, this fundamental problem – the landscape in flux and our struggle to grasp it – is explored from a variety of vantage points, through photographic series, videos and immersive installations. What binds the works together is paleo-climatology, a compelling discipline that studies the past to better understand the future. Noémie Goudal draws on it as a foundation to craft the chapters of a visual epic; currently on view at the exhibition Inhale Exhale.

IN EX HALE: a neon work presented on the gallery’s window repeats its title in a jolting rhythm, the two prefixes IN and EX alternately flickering on and off. This is no image of calm respiration: the light flares and stutters like a syncopated breath, an extrasystole. What does this restless breathing suggest, poised between the resistance of concrete matter and a metaphorical commentary on the world?

For this exhibition, Noémie Goudal’s approach to space is a conceptual continuation of her previous research: her scenographic gesture displaces and reimagines the very tools that contributed to the making of themselves. As in her photographs and videos, the artist embraces a form of decorative craftsmanship in constructing her visual apparatuses. She does not obscure the structural archaisms, nor does she relinquish the poetic dimension of the mise en scène. Here, the artist has lined several walls with floating color filters, which inevitably evoke celluloid film, gelatinous strips that quite literally measure the time of an image in footage. On these striped partitions which allow air to circulate and sculpt the light, the photographs appear to mysteriously levitate.

Within this space of virtual projection, Noémie Goudal presents a selection of works that all interrogate the construction of images. Whether from recent or older photographic or videographic works, they probe the physical and philosophical frameworks of representation. While manipulating the art of illusion, the artist nonetheless leaves visible clues to her artifacts to the attentive observer. The exhibition thus unfolds like an investigation: through water and fire, in the living matter of the landscape, the images reveal their multiple layers as well as their off-frame dimensions, all the while probing the place of humankind within its environment.

Text: Eva Prouteau

Translation: Bárbara Borges de Campos