BRUSSELS, BELGIUM.- Think.21 Gallery presents Paradoxical Visions or Paradoxes of Light - Arnaud Gerniers, on view 14 September - 17 November. A primary and fundamental light, suppressed but yet forcing its way through a well of darkness, vibrations of life and colour that sculpt the space and draw forms, those are Arnaud Gerniers's mechanism, which fascinate by their immateriality and beauty.

Of an hypnotic efficiency, Gerniers's devices strike first with the seeming simplicity of their installation: a confined architectural space, a single source of light and nucleic shapes with a black core from which escape circular halos diffused with different colours. However, retinal and metaphorical discomfort settles, stimulated by the containment of the installation and the vibrations, although deaf and elusive, of the luminous rays.

The usual reference points and perceptions slip out while we confront a system where nothing ultimately is as simple as it appears: the chromatic vibration is rigorously drawn, controlled and statically schematized. More than light drawings that carve the architectural space, it would undoubtedly be more appropriate to speak of drawings "on" light. Filter after filter, the colour spectrum is cleaned up until it attains a saturated, although never entirely, black colour. This is what bestows ultimately its depth and mystery.

A spiritual element believed to escape from materiality, light was for a long time the central and inherent element of aesthetic thought. It established the synthetic link between line and matter, drawing and colour, Apollinian and Dionysiac, between the spirit and the body of art, like a revealing agent that photography will expose in its turn in the most concrete aspects of its material action…

It's on this issue that lays the main interest and stake of the show at think.21. Next to the black cube installation, imposing silver photographs of the technical room are hung, thus giving again life and form to the projections. What is in question here is the reformulation of the investigation, of a new challenge, and not the reformulation of a simple trace or commodified reproduction.

The effect resists, to borrow from a technical term, fixation. The efficiency of this pupil-vortex is entire while concentric rings, of a blurred and blended gradation of an incredible precision, escape.

The retinal effect, augmented and nourished by the spatial and kinetic reluctance generated by the image, is reflected in its turn in the symbolic interpretation of the form: the haptic(??) force of the image hesitates in fact between being sucked up by the nucleic vortex, which resonates of "black holes" and matrixes, and an erupted effect of a "big brother" pupil.

In the antipodes of a tradition that puts in order the fictitious field of painting or the sculptural form at the ell of the viewers organised and normalising glances, here, it is the beholder, who, in his own space, seems to be subjected to the expansive growth of a work that looks at him. That looks at us.