PARIS.- Peter Freeman, Inc. is presenting Dove Allouche's first exhibition at the Paris location, and his fourth collaboration with the gallery. Entitled CHNOPS, it brings together nine works from the new photographic series Halley (2024–2025), as well as six of the 96 color photographs from his series Tableau Périodique (2024).

Before Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, and finally Edmond Halley understood that the movement of comets across the sky obeyed the same laws as the movement of planets, comets were viewed with fear and superstition—as evidenced by Voltaire's beautiful verses on the subject, written in 1738: "Comets, feared like thunder, cease to terrify the peoples of the Earth. Complete your course in an immense ellipse, ascend, descend near the star of days, launch your fires, fly, and returning endlessly, revive the old age of exhausted worlds."

Halley's Comet, undoubtedly the most famous example, was also the first known periodic comet. Its regular trajectory brings it close to Earth at intervals of approximately 76 years, and has done so since time immemorial. This periodicity is a temporal marker that spans generation after generation as the comet makes its successive returns. We are all potential witnesses to the comet's passage, as the 76-year period also corresponds to human life expectancy.

It is precisely this parallel between the periodicity of Halley's Comet, seen as a cosmic pendulum, and the scale of human life that prompted Dove Allouche to ask Javier Fresán to transcribe his subject into mathematical language: a meta-period beyond the sequence of events that constitute all human existence.

Comets are considered to be the most primitive matter in our solar system. More than 4.6 billion years old, they are made up of aggregates of interstellar icy grains, whose chemical composition is believed to have led to the emergence of life. Among the current hypotheses on the emergence of life on our planet is the contribution by comet fragments of chemically complex molecules involved in the genesis of life on Earth.

These celestial bodies lead us by extension to the second series of works featured in this exhibition: 96 color photographs related to the chemical elements listed in the periodic table.

In 1869, Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev had the brilliant and miraculous idea of classifying chemical elements according to their properties. He identified the existence of a global organization linking all the elements together in order of their atomic weights, in "horizontal periods." This system was not guided by chance but by a precise and exact principle, with each element echoing the properties of the one above it, constituting a slightly heavier member of the family. The same melody, so to speak, played in each period.

The resulting periodic table of chemical elements is one of science's most important achievements. It is a unique conceptual tool for predicting the appearance and properties of matter on Earth and throughout the rest of the universe.

It was during a residency in the United States (Villa Albertine, Texas, 2021–2022) and with the support of the National Institute of Standards and Technology that Allouche undertook his photographic project, representing the chemical elements that make up all ordinary matter in the universe.

Inspired by Oliver Sachs' words, "Mendeleev's table evokes a cosmic staircase whose steps allow one to ascend to the Pythagorean heavens as well as descend from them," Allouche wanted to use spectroscopy to associate the names of chemical elements with the light they emit. Each chemical element has its own emission spectrum, which is as unique as a fingerprint.

The result is a set of images comparable to the music of atomic spheres, where each emission spectrum has its own intensity pattern, with distinct monochromatic radiations visible in the form of fine, colored lines interspersed with black bands.

The presentation of these photographs of the elements was not intended to be exhaustive. Only six photographs corresponding to the main chemical elements that make up living matter: carbon (C), hydrogen (H), nitrogen (N), oxygen (O), phosphorus (P), and sulfur (S), will be presented in conversation with his series of photographs of Halley's Comet.

A text by art critic and curator Anne Bonnin will accompany the exhibition.